For two weeks last summer I used the Ultimate Direction FK Trekking Poles while guiding trips on the Pfiffner Traverse in Colorado’s Rocky Mountain National Park. The FK Poles were new for spring 2018 and are part of an adventure-oriented collection that also includes the FK Tarp, FK Bivy, and FK Gaiters. FK is short for “fastest known,” as in fastest known time, which is suggestive of the design ethos—an emphasis on performance and weight, not necessarily comfort or convenience.

The FK Poles are stronger and stiffer than any trekking or ski pole that I have ever used, while also being among the lightest—just 3.7 ounces for my size, 115 centimeters without straps or baskets. They are an absolute joy to use.

However, because they cannot be adjusted or collapsed, these poles have limitations. They don’t stow away well on flights, so they are best for local trips without extensive scrambling, and they are not compatible with many trekking-pole-supported shelters without additional pole jacks.

I found just one flaw with my preproduction FK Poles—the tips quickly wore out. But that was reportedly addressed before full production.

Product Specs

4 oz per pole (for the 115-centimeter length)

Single-piece, fixed-length carbon-fiber shaft

Aramid-wrapped lower shaft for abrasion resistance

EVA foam grip with extensions

Woven nylon wrist strap

Available from 110-centimeter to 135-centimeter lengths (in 5-centimeter increments)

By increasing the shaft diameter, pole strength and stiffness both increase exponentially. If you’re a physicist or an engineer, please chime in on the accuracy of Ultimate Direction’s claim: “Increasing the diameter doesn’t just increase the strength proportionally, it squares the strength and cubes the increase in stiffness!”

The FK Pole is so strong and stiff that it almost feels like another material. I’ve been using carbon-fiber poles for 15 years, and these feel utterly different.

The maximum diameter of the FK Poles is 20 millimeters. Most poles are 18 millimeters, and some are just 13.5 millimeters. (Andrew Skurka)

Competition

The Black Diamond Vapor Carbon 1 ($150, 5.5 oz for 115 centimeters) is the most similar, with long foam grips and carbide tips but narrower shafts.

Carpoon, from Sage and filmmakers Idarado Media, follows woodworker Wes Walsworth as he pursues carp on the Snake River. The Snake is renowned for its trout, but for Walsworth the thrill of hooking into a carp in skinny water is better than a crowded trout stream.

Photo Gallery: High Fashion on the Pacific Crest Trail

What could be worse than a laughably incompetent Secretary of the Interior who’s transparent in his desire to sell off our nation’s public lands to extraction industries? Well, how about someone with the experience and expertise to actually pull that feat off? Meet David Bernhardt, Zinke’s deputy and the man who will take over the Department of the Interior if Zinke is fired or resigns, as is rumored.

If Zinke is a swamp monster, then Bernhardt is the bigger, meaner swamp monster who shows up just when the heroes of this bad movie thought they’d won. Before accepting his current job as Deputy Secretary of the Interior, Bernhardt worked as a lobbyist for the oil, gas, and agriculture industries—industries that he’s now in a position to help regulate. Except he’s big on putting a “de” in front of that word.

Take his actions to benefit one former client, the Westlands Water District (WWD). In 2015, Bernhardt helped that organization reach a deal with the federal government that turned the WWD into the largest and most powerful agricultural water provider in the country. The deal guaranteed its access to California’s fresh water resources in perpetuity. One of Bernhardt's first actions upon assuming office was to take the lead on an initiative to divert fresh water from northern California down into the Central Valley, in benefit of WWD. When California objected, Zinke and Bernhardt’s agency threatened to sue. (This fracas may be what was behind President Trump’s bizarre claim that California was pumping water that should be used for firefighting out to sea.)

https://twitter.com/realDonaldTrump/status/1026524292396273664

That this incredible conflict of interest was allowed to happen isn’t actually the main concern here. It’s Bernhardt’s ability to pull off all of the above without making mainstream headlines and without his name becoming widely known to the public. I spoke to a Democratic Congressional staffer who asked to remain anonymous last month. They described Zinke’s corruption as “penny grifting,” but warned that Bernhardt could be a “puppet master.”

And he has ambitions beyond just California’s water rights. In August, he penned an op-ed for the Washington Postarguing to reduce protections provided by the Endangered Species Act. The scariest part of it is how well argued it is. You’d be forgiven for thinking Bernhardt has a point, until you realize his argument is drawn from talking points put together by the far-right, anti-public lands Heritage Foundation. Bernhardt wants to reduce the power of the Endangered Species Act in order to limit its burden on extraction industries. Heck, he gave a speech stating that to the Heritage Foundation in September.

Bernhardt’s links to industry have remained so strong during his tenure as Deputy Secretary that he’s actually drawn complaints from ethics watchdogs that he’s illegally continued his lobby activities while serving as a government official. According to a Campaign for Accountability complaint, he submitted a draft executive order about water rights in California to WWD for edits. The organization also alleges that he continued his work advising WWD well into 2017.

The complaint concludes with a request for investigation: “Based on the available evidence, it appears that Mr. Bernhardt may have [violated ethics rules] by failing to maintain his lobbying registration as required by the LDA. As a result, Campaign for Accountability respectfully requests that your office promptly initiate an investigation into this matter.”

With Democrats taking control of the house, we’re getting a new chairperson of the House Natural Resources Committee, Raul Grijalva, who is eager to exercise oversight of the DOI. It’s easy to see scandal-plagued, gaff-prone Zinke being checked by that oversight. The concern with Bernhardt is that we’re actually going to face a villain who know’s what he’s doing.

“Therefore shall a man leave his father and his mother, and shall cleave unto his wife: and they shall be one flesh.” —Genesis 2:24

1.

“Have you been cleaving?”

“Yes.”

“You and Betty Jane have been cleaving right here in Eden?” I ask.

“Ya,” says John.

The luscious Betty Jane starts chuckling.

“You’ve been cleaving right here in Eden Township, Pennsylvania, just as the Lord commands in the Bible?”

Clip clop clip clop clip clop. A buggy goes by.

“Ya,” says John.

I glance inside the buggy. The carved-wood interior is so fabulous it looks like a duke’s library. And the horse? It could be entered in the Miss Universe pageant.

“So you and Betty Jane have cleavedoutside—repeat, outside—in the garden, right?”

Betty Jane’s fantastic bosom has been shaking with silent laughter for the last minute or so, and now she lets go with a merry screech.

“Ya!” she says.

2.

In America, you can stroll up and ask a stranger just about any question if you frame it with the Bible. I know this because I’ve been booming down the East Coast of the USA, visiting every town called Eden that comes my way—and by God, nearly every state has a little town called Eden—to speak with folks about Adam, Eve, ribs, apples, snakes, temptations, and so forth. My mission: to right past wrongs committed by Outside magazine.

I’ve been reading Outside for 40 years. Hell, I started writing for it in 1980, and I’m aware that everybody has one question when they finish an Outside story: How did those climbers defy death on that mountain?

But I always have a second question: Did those climbers have sex on that mountain? That’s what Iwant to know. Did those hikers, climbers, skiers, kayakers, divers, snowshoers, those ladies and gentlemen with their $2,000 titanium bikes, those adventurers with all their glamour, joy, stamina, calf muscles, and grit—did those people I’m reading about in Outsideshag on the spongy bank of that raging river?

Therefore, I’m on a summer road trip. I’ve packed three apple pies, three ShopRite birthday cakes, two bags of miniature Snickers, three bags of Unique pretzels, a carton of extra-thick French onion dip, and a block of Colby cheese—I’m eating only forbidden fruits on this journey—climbed into my Prius, and sallied forth with my giant poodle, Lewis Carroll, to ask Edenites all over the eastern and southern U.S. this question: “Have you ever made love outside—in Eden?”

If they say yes, then, in the greataward-winning Outside tradition, I plan to take a spectacular photo of the persons standing in the very spot where they cleaved. And thus we will all have a record of heaven on earth.

3.

Not to leave the luscious Betty Jane and her husband hanging, but a word about the word cleave. You may quarrel with it. You may say that it’s imprecise, that it’s too divine, but I can’t go running around Eden, Pennsylvania, or Eden, Maryland, or Eden, North Carolina, or Eden, Georgia, or Eden, Alabama, or Eden, Mississippi, asking people if they’ve boffed, can I? Banged? Come on. They’d laugh me out of paradise. Therefore, cleave will be the verb of choice. John and Betty Jane know their Bible and grok this word like a plate of ribs.

John, however, doesn’t seem as sure as Betty Jane about the cleaving outside part. “It was so long ago, I can’t remember,” he says. John is about 30, tall and lean, with a face as long as a loaf pan, sharp gray eyes, a big, beautiful black hat, and the beginnings of a pointy, buckwheat-colored beard.

“Phoo! Phoo!” I say. “How can you forget? Look at her!”

I nod at Betty Jane, a woman so good-humored, so creamy, so pink, so white, with such a little turned-up, sunburned nose, and wearing such a pretty apron and cap, that there’s no way John can have “forgotten” possessing her in the garden.

“I expect we have,” says Betty Jane, chuckling and looking at John through her dark lashes.

“Ya,” says John.

He was born across the road on this very hilltop, and the tender, homely beauty of this Eden, with its lovely green hills and blue dales and lilac-gray clouds, is so delicate that I want to throw myself on the ground and roll down the hill and just keep rolling. The massive barn is built of pale, rose-colored stone. A litter of German shepherd puppies is tumbling about in front of the wagon shed; beyond, great glistening silos rise like rocket ships to Mars.

“Oh. You remember now, eh?” I say to John.

“Ya.”

“You’ve cleaved outside!” I say, laughing. “You’ve cleaved in the garden of Eden—in the barn, in the buggy, in the yard, right?”

They both burst into happy laughter.

Lewis Carroll, with his head out the car window, starts barking ecstatically. At such a moment, not even John Steinbeck’s Charley could have maintained strict canine silence.

“Now, I’d like to take your photo in the garden,” I say, reaching for my iPhone.

The laughter dies. John looks at me in dismay.

John and Betty Jane are Amish. Eden Township is in the heart of the heart of Lancaster County. To many Amish, appearing in a photo would be “calling attention to oneself.” Creating vanity.

“I don’t mind,” says Betty Jane. Gloria Steinem at the barricades. She glances at her husband. “But it’s up to John.”

“Why do you want our picture?” John says gravely. His first language is Pennsylvania Dutch, and he speaks, by some strange miracle, with a melodious Scots accent. He’s a cradle maker, a witty, serious chap with the air of a young Silicon Valley engineer who has given up the company Ping-Pong table for a month. I can already see the decision in his face.

“Meeting you is an important moment in my life, John,” I say. “And Outside may run the photo.”

“I was taught not to be photographed,” he says.

And that’s that. I can take a picture of Betty Jane’s pink hydrangeas, the blond mules, the black-and-white cows, the red rooster, and the gray hens, but not of Betty Jane and John. And I would have squandered all my iPhone storage on them, I loved them so.

4.

About 900 yards outside Eden Township I run into Zach, a cage fighter coming out of the Body Extreme Fitness Center in a town called Quarryville. He’s wearing black MMA shorts, and Kayla, his girlfriend, a college student, a gentle, modest, sweet young woman who works at the gym, is with him, and they both become so worried about a dithering old lady with a broken arm who’s struggling with her bag and her notebook and her pen and her Unique pretzel bag and her water bottle and her giant poodle that Kayla takes the leash so that she and Zach can walk Lewis Carroll down to a little park. Before they even know what happened, we’re deep into the interesting subject of cleaving.

(Beware of old journalists: we have old tricks. I do have broken bones, though. Before hitting the road, I fell off a bridge while hiking on the Appalachian Trail near my home in New York State, breaking my arm in four places.)

We begin by giving Zach and Kayla a little Bible quiz.

“What is the fruit Eve ate?”

Zach and Kayla’s score: 0.

“To whom did Eve give the fruit?”

Score: 0.

“Why did the Lord toss Adam and Eve out of Eden?”

Score: 0.

Maybe they should read Zach’s shorts, which have “I Can Do All Through Christ Who Strengthens Me” written on them in white letters. The little Quarryville park we’re in is so green, it’s chartreuse.

“Have you multiplied yet?” I ask, trying a new approach.

“No,” says Kayla, laughing.

“Have you cleaved?” I say.

Like all muscle guys, Zach tenderly slides his hands over his biceps to feel their power.

“I believe so,” says Zach.

“So you guys have cleaved?”

Zach grins, locking his knees in and out.

“Have you ever cleaved in Eden?”

They look at each other.

“No,” says Zach.

“Please,” I shout. “Tell me you’ve cleaved in Eden!”

They stare at me nervously.

“You must have cleaved in Eden!” I say. After all, Eden is less than a thousand yards from where we’re standing. “Can you take me to the spot?”

Kayla blinks her enormous blue eyes and looks at Zach with her mouth open.

Zach shrugs, runs his hands up and down his biceps, looks at me, and says in a low voice: “I have no idea.”

“Well, have you cleaved outside?”

“No,” says Zach.

He weaves back and forth. His fight name should be Stall-Weaver.

“Wait,” I say. “You haven’t cleaved outside?”

“No.”

“What’s the matter with you two?”

Kayla can stand it no longer. She points at Zach. “It’s him!”

Zach looks at me and confesses that they’ve only cleaved indoors—among other places, in both their parents’ bedrooms. He blushes.

“Wait. You’re actually trying to tell me that you don’t cleave outside and yet you do cage matches?”

Zach hangs his head and laughs. “I feel I have to be more gentleman-like than doin’ it just anywhere,” he says, weaving andfondling his biceps.

“What?No! No! Cleaving outside is what gentlemen do!”

Kayla’s face turns pink, and she takes a breath in an ecstatic little gasp.

5.

The Garden of Eden was a utopia. People are happy in utopias. The kayakers I meet coming off the brown Conestoga River in Eden, Pennsylvania, are in ecstasy, for instance. But I am sad. How can I not be sad when I can’t get a single photo of an outdoor cleaving spot and correct the injustices committed by Outside magazine?

Such are my ruminations as I finish off the last of the birthday cake, say farewell to Pennsylvania, invade Maryland, and biff down the Delmarva Peninsula. I can’t say much for the scenery. Everyone knows more about the beauty of Maryland than I do, certainly, and if you don’t know about the beauty of Maryland, you better Google it, because this stretch of highway—called the Ocean Gateway, though it’s about 50 miles from any ocean—looks like one long, flat, sandy clump of hopeless, tick-ridden grass dotted with absolute crap. One doesn’t expect Yosemite at every turn, of course, and I drive nice and slow, and Lewis hangs his head out the window, and as we pass the bars, the car dealerships, and the crab shacks, I sing my favorite road song, “Me and Bobby McGee.” You remember the words:

The next morning, after nine hours of sleep and using all the towels, shampoo, cream rinse, body lotion, and laundry bags, the ice bucket for Lewis’s water bowl, the shoe-shine cloth to clean Lewis’s ears, etc., I line up to get Lewis his morning egg at the “free hot breakfast” provided by the Salisbury, Maryland, Quality Inn. In front of me is a huge young man with the round, happy face of a toddler. We reach the buffet.

“Whoa!” I cry. I stagger backward in stunned admiration.

The huge young man has carefully stacked 15 or 16 slices of white bread into two towers on his corrugated paper plate, erected a sausage sculpture on top of them, and is now drowning the entire edifice with imitation maple syrup. What a man! I want to ask if he is also on the Forbidden Fruits diet, but as he appears to be the coach of several young athletes who are sitting at tables all around us, eating sausage on top of donuts for their breakfasts, I think better of it.

Lewis gets his egg, and his walk, and we hit the road again. The car dealerships disappear and dense woods take over. An hour later, we enter the blue groves of Eden, Maryland, and come upon a woman named Crissy in her garden.

She is not happy.

“What do you mean you’re not happy,” I say. “This is Eden! Heaven on earth!”

Crissy is a cute blonde holding a fat fawn dog.

“Well,” she says, shifting the dog to her hip. “This is noheaven.”

“But, but, this is Eden!” I say, with a sweep of my good arm. “Woods in your backyard, meadows up to your windowsill, wild fruits, singing birds, crystalline creeks—”

“It’s boring,” says Crissy.

“But it’s Eden!”

“Not to me. People here don’t even work!”

She nods down the road at the trailer houses.

“Exactly,” I say. “It’s Eden.”

Her dog has the face of Steve Bannon. I catch him sneering at Lewis Carroll, who is at his post in the back seat of the Prius with his head out the half-open window.

“Anyway, my boyfriend lives in Ocean City. I’m moving there.”

“What?! You’re leaving Eden?”

Lewis’s side of the car looks like it’s been hit with a bucket of water, so furiously is he drooling to get at the little asshole in Crissy’s arms.

“There’s nothing to do here!” says Crissy.

“But Kevin Allen Smith, who farms just across the road over there”—I point to the field I just came from—“says it’s bliss.”

Crissy snorts.

“Kevin Allen Smith is cultivating his garden like it says in the Bible,” I say. “And I see you are cultivating your garden.” (I indicate her lilies and zinnias.) “Have you multiplied yet?”

“Not yet,” says Crissy.

“Have you cleaved?”

“I don’t want to say. We’re not married.”

“Bah! Adam and Eve weren’t married. There was no wedding ceremony. The Lord just told ’em to cleave.”

“You have a very different way of looking at things”

“I’m from New York.”

Speaking of which, Lewis, a “New York huntin’ dog” as I tell the old boys who ask about him in Pennsylvania, has an electric blue flattop and wears a 17th-century-style ruff of ribbons, and at this moment he is attempting to pull the car window out with his teeth and give Steve Bannon a trip to the veterinarian.

“So have you cleaved here in Eden?”

“Yes,” says Crissy.

“Have you cleaved here in the garden?”

She smiles, looks at the stalks of expired irises, and says, “I’m not sayin’.”

“Ha!” I shout. You have cleaved in this garden!”

“I’m not sayin’!” says Crissy, chortling.

“Hold it right there, girl,” I cry. “I’m taking your picture!”

6.

In regard to my Kevin Allen Smith reference:

According to my bible,the Great Creator, Jack Kerouac, ate apple pie à la mode “all the way across the country” in On the Road, because “it was nutritious and it was delicious, of course.”

Consequently, I’m so ravenous for something green that when I spy Kevin Allen Smith whamming back and forth in his Eden kale field, at the wheel of a big Massey-Ferguson tractor, I drive straight through his five “Stay Out” signs and, pausing just long enough for a brief chat with the man, fling myself upon his kale.

I can say, without exaggeration, that this fucking kale saves my life.

Plus, Kevin Allen Smith, a prosperous bachelor farmer who comes in the large economy size with the oblong face of a newborn, and whose lilting speech is so musical that it sounds like I’m speaking with Pavarotti, and who tells me that he believes the fruit that Eve employed to tempt Adam was a tomato, shyly admits to cleaving in this very kale field, and I take 105 pictures of him—105!

“Well,” I say, as I’m leaving. “It’s been heaven, Kevin!”

“Text me sometime,” he says.

“Oh, I will!”

“Anybody ever grab ya?” he says.

“Naw, I’m too big and too old.”

“I like older women.”

“Who doesn’t?” I say. Then, checking the rearview mirror, with Lewis at his post in the back seat, I tromp the accelerator, back away from the “Keep Out” signs at 25 miles per hour, turn, and squeal out of Eden, my heart full of joy and the front seat crammed with kale.

7.

This part I’ve saved until we got to know each other better.

I listen to Agatha Christie detective fiction when I’m driving. Dame Agatha’s At Bertram’s Hotel is my choice for the glamorous nine-hour journey from Eden, Maryland, to Eden, North Carolina.

As Miss Marple checks into the hotel and begins to have her suspicions, Lewis and I shoot down the long toe of southern Maryland, rip across Fisherman Island National Wildlife Refuge, zoom over the mighty Chesapeake Bay Bridge, roar through the tunnel, and wail on to Norfolk, Virginia.

Now, it so happens that, just across the Elizabeth River at Portsmouth, there’s some fast heel-and-toe work required to stay on Interstate 264 and not go bowling off onto Interstate 464. At this exciting juncture, Miss Marple, wearing her fluffy shawl and working her knitting, is seated in the hotel lobby at a tea table, warning Chief Inspector Davy that she feels “very uneasy” when... Blam! Blam! OMG! Shots ring out, and I jerk into the shoulder, right when Michael “Micky” Gorman steps in front of the heiress, the Honourable Elvira Blake, and takes a bullet, and—and, well, this is when a cop pulls me over.

While the cop adjusts his large drill-sergeant hat and takes the slow walk to the Prius, I should probably take this opportunity to tell you that I’ve hand-painted large blue polka dots on my car. I roll down the window and sing out, “Hello, officer!”

It is 97 degrees.

The officer bends, looks inside the car, and says, startled, “Ma’am! Are you OK?”

“I’m fabulous!”

“Are you wounded?”

This is where I should not neglect to point out that I’m wearing a Quality Inn white-and-orange plastic laundry bag around my head.

“I’m fine, sir!”

“Your head, ma’am—have you been hit?”

“Oh!” I say, laughing, raising both hands to my skull. “This? Hahaha! I had to use it to tie my hair out of my eyes—see?” I remove it, hair falls all over my face, and the cop gives me a ticket for “failure to obey highway sign.”

8.

The drive-in movie, the roller dome, the old-timey baseball fields, canoes on the rivers, the drive-in hamburger joint called Dick’s (where Lewis Carroll and I are served the best homemade apple pie and ice cream of our lives by the country’s fizziest carhops)—Eden, North Carolina, produces such a combination of charms that one doesn’t mind the relatively mild temperatures. Of course, it will get hotter as we head into Georgia and Alabama: It’s only a touch over 98 in Eden

I’m inside the Red River Grill, plying a young man I met with a basket of French fries, preparatory to getting into the cleaving questions, when a burly cop rushes in.

“A dog!” cries the cop, addressing the entire, and almost entirely empty, restaurant. “A dog is locked in a polka-dot car out there with the windows up!”

I put down my ice tea and stand. “It’s electric, officer!”

He hastens over. “But the windows are up, ma’am!”

“Yes, officer! I have the windows up. The car is running with the air-conditioning on.”

“That car’s runnin’?” he says. “Are you sure?”

Lewis Carroll in the polka dot car (E. Jean Carroll)

His alarmed expression, so rare on a cop’s face, jars me. The car is so quiet that I’ve absently turned the engine off without realizing it at least 20 times. I’ve turned it off while waiting at a stop light. I’ve turned it off at drive-through banks. Once, I came out of the house and was amazed to find the car still on from the night before.

“Well, officer,” I start to reply, but the vision of Lewis baking to death ignites me, and I runout the door and up a little incline to the hot parking lot, with the cop—belts, straps, clasps, badges, radios, stick, cuffs, gun all jiggling—right behind me.

In the boiling sun sits the Prius, silent as a sphinx. I beep the locks, seize the handle. and open the back door.

“Goldarn,” whispers the cop.

On his back, stretched out on the seat, legs spread, toes up, there is Lewis, the car so cold that he smiles in his sleep like Roald Amundsen at the South Pole.

9.

And that lad I was plying with French fries at the Red River Grill when the cop rushed in? His name is Tony. He is 19 and was voted employee of the month at the big shipping company where he works, and for $350 down he is now buying his own house. But alas! He and his girlfriend recently broke up.

He is a sweet, tenderhearted youth, with hair that hangs down in ringlets and big, black, sad eyes, and I hesitate to start in with the cleaving business. But Tony likes discussing heartache. He is such a philosopher, in fact, that we soon set out for the Eden boat drop on the famous Dan River, where he cleaved amidst the swinging vines, poison ivy, and mud with his girlfriend. “All the time,” he says. The rogue!

I take 289 photos, and when we walk back up to the Leakesville Landing above the river, we interrupt a marriage proposal.

Dean Moriarty in On the Road proposes marriage to various young tomatoes almost continuously. And not only can I make an argument that a proposal is the most serious form of cleaving, but also that Elizabeth Bennet’s road trip through Derbyshire with the Gardiners—which brings her to Pemberley for the first time—should perhaps earn Jane Austen the top spot, and that the dildo which figures so prominently in the early Hemingway road trip is a proposal all by itself. But either way, the betrothing we run into in Eden, North Carolina, looks like a capital affair.

Mr. Jarris Perkins, ex-Marine and rapper, wearing Duke of Buckingham breeches, a fishing vest, and a yellow polka-dot tie, is down on one knee before Miss Madeline Rondon, a lifestyle innovator and women’s advocate, who is attired in an Ali Baba skirt, a pink midriff bra, sparkly rainbows drawn above her breasts, bead earrings, bracelets, rings, spangles, tattoos, and a turban topped with a golden Cinderella crown. Jarris is promising something about loving Madeline “with every breath that he’ll take for the next thousand centuries,” so it certainly looksand sounds like a marriage proposal to me. But you be the judge, Reader, and please take a look at this photo:

The marriage proposal (E. Jean Carroll)

If that’s not a marriage proposal, I’ll eat my size 11 shoe. Later, when Madeline and Jarris serve me a fine dinner of biscuits and gravy, tilapia, peas, corn, and stuffing at their home in Eden, accompanied by their pit bull, Princess Beulah Mae, along with a passel of the best-behaved children I’ve seen in years (some of whom are the progeny of women Madeline advocates for), I ask about the proposal, and Jarris says, “I’m the ultimate player!”

This is a bit jarring. I glance at Madeline.

“He runs away,” she says matter-of-factly. “He’s Peter Pan.”

“Ah!” I say. A romantic, I frown at my plate.

“This is our story,” says Madeline, laying her hand on my arm. “I was a madam. And he was a pimp.”

My stupefied delight as I receive this news—and begin to comprehend the enormous struggle and resulting triumph of two people making a new life together and settling down in Eden—puts me in an exquisitely happy mood that lasts for the rest of the trip.

Later, when I’m far away from North Carolina, I realize I need to fact-check the name of the promontory where I witnessed the proposal, so I text Madeline.

She texts back in all-caps that Jarris has “LEFT AGAIN AND I WON’T ALLOW HIM TO CONTINUE DOING THIS.”

Then she adds: “YOU HAD TO GO THERE DIDN’T YOU LOL.”

If two ardent former professionals possessing all that is amiable, all that is attaching, and living in Eden, can’t solve the ancient mystery (How to Make Love Stay), I begin to wonder: Who can?

11.

Let other journalists dwell on the fickleness of men. I drop such fellows as quick as I can.

With Miss Marple investigating The Murder in the Vicarage, and Lewis at his post in the back seat,we drop down the coast of North Carolina, ditto South Carolina, and lurching from historical marker to historical marker, we totter into Georgia. I am sorry I can’t give you a description of the famous Civil War battles. This would have been an excellent occasion to consult the fabled E. Jean Carroll Civil War Library. But as the collection consists entirely of Gone with the Wind, and as I didn’t bring a copy with me, I have difficulty remembering which bloodbaths took place where around here. Though, oddly, I remember what Scarlett O’Hara is wearing in nearly every spot in the movie.

I can tell you that the Georgia countryside—and I have looked at so much of this world in my last 75 years, a road trip frees me to be myself and not look at countryside—smellslike Pine-Sol and gin, some of the back roads are so red they’re pink, and the hills look tired out. like people have been having too much fun on them.

Northern Georgia, where the Appalachian Trail starts, is a real stunner, I’ve heard from hiking friends: Peaks! Chasms! Waterfalls! Eden, Georgia, which is in the south, near Savannah, is flat as a tabletop. But Lewis and I like flat hamlets, and we bustle in on Sunday morning, just in time for me to slip into the peaceful little Powers Baptist Church (est. 1792), take a pew in the back, jump to my feet, and shout “I do! I do!” when Pastor Travis Cowart, looking genially around the large congregation, innocently asks if anyone “has any special words for us today.” My sermon—to receive a copy, please e-mail e.jean@askejean.com—receives a sitting ovation.

Afterward, a great, loud, handsome, jolly, tall, 78-year-old boat racer with sparkling dark eyes, wearing an aqua-striped shirt, and holding a big leather-bound Bible with his name engraved in gold introduces himself as “the original redneck” and then adds, with the sound of a flock of geese flying overhead: “Call me Leslie HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW.” He commands me to “git in your car and follow my truck!” I do. We whiz along red dirt through pine trees and skim past the edges of a pond, roll around a lake, and then another lake, or maybe it is the same lake—“We own four of the lakes around here,” Leslie later tells me—and arrive at his estate for lunch. I meet his wife, Beauford, a young Georgia peach of 76.

“You ever made love outside?” I say after lunch. (Squash casserole, zipper peas, sliced tomatoes, and meatloaf arrayed on a tablescape with a cheery motif, all prepared by a woman who did not know a guest was coming.)

“HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW,” laughs Leslie. His admiration for his wife causes him to turn red as a geranium.

“Don’t tell her about the patio!” says Beauford.

We are in the kitchen. We all pause and look out at the alabaster patio, and at the cool, lavender-green lake and the dark purple forest beyond the patio, and at the kayaks, canoes, campers, Ski-Doos, ski boat, paddleboat, flatboat, and pontoons ornamenting Leslie and Beauford’s yard.

“It was a full moon that night,” Leslie says softly. (Clarification: Leslie’s soft voice is about the same you would use to shout over the noise of a vacuum cleaner.)

“Full moon,” says Beauford, evidently changing her mind about not talking about the patio.

“And he’s enticing me out on the patio, saying, Come on out here. Come on! And I’m in my gown. And he’s got nothin’ on, cuz he never wears nothin’ when he’s goin’ to bed.”

“HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW HAW,” laughs Leslie, who I didn’t think could get any redder or happier, but he does.

“So I flip the gown over to the table out there, and all of a sudden he says: ‘Hush, hush!’And I’m standing real still.”

“She’s standing on the step right there,” says Leslie, pointing out the window to the very spot.

I picture Beauford in breathtaking semi-nudity, then in total nudity.

“And there it is,” she says. “The rattlesnake.”

I scream.

“Yeah,” says Beauford, who’s a retired nurse with a specialty in hemophilia, thank gawd, and was an all-state guard in basketball.“And I’m right there.”

“A timber rattler about that big around,” says Leslie. “And about that long.”

Very big around. Very long. “No!” I cry.

“By the time I got the shovel, his head was up on the second step,” says Leslie.

“Where I was standing,” says Beauford.

“Noooooooo!”

“So,” says Leslie, “I chopped his head off.”

How different things would be in the world if Eve or Adam had had that shovel, eh? So vivid in his memory are his wife’s charms, Leslie can quote himself from that night: “I know we ain’t gonna do it on the patio now,” he recalls. “So I said, ‘Let’s go in the bedroom.’”

12.

When it comes to car brakes, there are good brakes, there are bad brakes, there are very bad brakes, there are really very bad brakes, and there are brakes after you wave goodbye to Leslie and Beauford and you bounce over a log in their backyard. A warning light immediately starts flashing. By the time I drive past all the ponds and lakes again and reach the Powers Baptist Church Cemetery, there are so many warning lights flashing on my dashboard, indicating that I should “stop immediately,” that I pull over to the side of the road and say to Lewis Carroll: “Some people die and go to Eden, and some peoplego to Eden to die.”

My spirits lift somewhat when every—mind you, every—old boy in Georgia who stops to inquire if I “need any help” tells me to “ignore” the warning lights. One even says he’s driven his “camper like that for years.”

I drive the bugger all the way back to Savannah at 25 miles per hour and head to a Toyota place. “You got here just in time!” says a technician. “The — is missing. Gone. What happened? Were you in a wreck?”

I have no idea what the tech said was missing, but the Prius spends only two days on a pedestal, and it costs only $900 to get the thing fixed.

Making up for the two days, I put in some fast foot and ankle work across Georgia and come upon, amid piles of bricks, siding, sawdust, and planks, the three handsomest carpenters (Hi, David! Hi, Logan! Hi, Jared!) I ever saw in my life. They are restoring a bungalow (three fireplaces, four rooms, unequalled snugness) in Eden, Alabama. I snap David’s picture at the drive-in movie where he lately cleaved with his wife, and with a brief halt at the George Wallace Rest Stop, where the bathroom attendants are attired like a cross between Hotel du Cap bellboys and Yellowstone Park forest rangers, and where one can eat off the ladies’ room floor, I arrive in Eden, Mississippi.

Though I’m not quite certain it isEden, Mississippi. It’s near the famous Mississippi Blues Trail, yes. And it is old and very, very blue, no question; but it looks like the Miss Havisham of the Edens. It’s a little withered, sunken, faded, and jilted by the world. And like Miss Havisham, it seems to need a little diversion.

Across the highway is the sweet and scrabbly field where the aging but still fabulous Eden Star quarter horse (“World Champ. Producer”) takes his evening gallop. I flag down a UPS guy.

“Sir! Sir! Can you tell me where Eden is?”

“Right here,” he says.

“Not here here?”

“Yes. Right here.”

“This is Eden?” I look up the brown road, which gives off the pleasant smell of dirt, though it’s a paved highway. “No way.”

“Yes. It’s Eden.”

“Well then, what’s it like delivering packages in heaven?”

It will hit 99 degrees in the next hour and then start climbing.

“Hot and dusty!” he answers and ascends into his truck.

That night it requires four pints of Halo Top ice cream (made by Eden Creamery) and a canned margarita to cool me off. The next day I return to Eden with a plan.

Since it’s so close to the Mississippi Blues Trail, and since James “Son” Thomas—the blues singer and sculptor whose countenance is as woeful as Don Quixote—was born in Eden, my plan is to knock on the door of each of the 50 or so houses, requisition the local intellects, find someone who plays the blues, and ask them to sing a song about cleaving.

13.

Val, a majestically shirtless landowner in a black cowboy hat, swears there are “no blues musicians in Eden, Mississippi.”

That’s right. That’s what he said. No blues players. Am I crushed? Do I care that there are no blues musicians in Eden? That my “plan” turns out to be a disaster? Ha! Ha! Ha! Ha! I have lost the capacity for personal suffering on this trip. I am immortal! I haven’t paid a bill in four weeks. I have fucked-off returning e-mail. I shower only when I want to. Forget making calls. I make friends with strangers. I throw fresh towels on the floor. I let the dog on the bed. I eat cake morning, noon, and night and I am losing weight. I don’t see the news. I see the people who are overlooked. Nobody X-rays my bags. Nobody orders me to remove my shoes. Nobody pats me down, and yet I have taken flight. I am driving the car that kids wave at. I am on the road.

And anyway, I’m too hot and too enchanted with Val and his plump and distractingly pretty wife, Angela. They fell in love in high school and have been together 14 years. Val owns seven acres that he bought from his parents.

Val and family in Mississippi (E. Jean Carroll)

“There’s this apple tree,” says Val when I ask him to tell me the Eden story. “And God says, ‘Don’t eat that fruit.’ But Eve eats it and says to Adam, ‘Here, honey, try this,’ and since Adam does everythingEve tells him to do, Adam says, ‘Yes, ma’am,’ and God tosses both of them out of Eden.”

That’s pretty much it.

“And have yougone forth and multiplied?” I say.

“We’ve done that,” says Val.

Their little daughter, Madilyn, a sprite of six or seven, is dancing around on the porch. Madison, their firstborn, is at cheerleading camp.

“So you’ve cleaved,” I say.

Val looks at Angela, puzzled. “Do you know what she’s talkin’ about?”

Angela signals me with her left eyelash—women are always, always more interested in sex than men—and then smiles at her husband. A doting wife, she does not want any egos deflated, but she doesn’t mind any minds being opened, either.

“Yes,” says Angela, “I think I know what she’s talking about.”

“The Lord said cleave unto her,” I say.

Little Madilyn stops twirling, walks over, plants both feet in front of me, and stares up. Her visiting cousins Jason and Dalton, large young saplings, also stare, and all three children start giggling.

“Become one flesh,” I say to Val.

Val scratches his armpit and looks at Angela.

“Is she sayin’...?”

“Become one flesh!” I shout exuberantly.

Their own personal porch thermometer reads 100. Perhaps it is too hot for Val to think, because he’s still stumped. I don’t quite know how to phrase it in front of the children.

“Be like married people,” I say.

Little Madilyn, tittering, looks up at me and stuffs both hands into her mouth to stop from whooping.

“You know,” says Angela elegantly.

She is a 911 emergency dispatcher. Val works for a big pipeline company.

“Cleaving! Cleaving!” I say, and no longer able to stand it, I run out on their absinthe-green lawn and shout: “Cleaving!”

“Oh!” says Val. “Yes! We cleave!”

The kids, my God! They love it! Madilyn bends at the waist, throws open her arms, and takes a bow.

“And have you cleaved outside?”

A jolt.

“No.”

“What?!”

“No.”

“Miss Angela,” I say, “Come on.”

“No,” says Angela.

“Egads! You’ve been together 14 years! You must be bored to death! You need to spice things up and do a little cleaving outside here.”

Val seems quite struck.

“That’s a good idea!” He says, and the tattoo of the comedy- drama masks on his upper left breast jumps up and down with delight.

“Wait,” I say. “You’ve never thought of this?”

They both shake their heads no.

“But I like the idea,” says Val, looking back at Angela to double-check her reaction—a trait I much admire in a husband.

“You should try it tonight!” I say.

Angela smiles at him, raising one eyebrow.

“We should!” says Val.

My work here is finished.

“Well, all I can say is thank God,” I say. “I staggered by here and saved your marriage.”

And, indeed, really now, how can I possibly point the Prius back to my cabin in New York? Aren’t there flocks of innocent people constantly and perpetually cleaving indoors who need to be roused and terrorized and flogged by old E. Jean into stepping outside? Aren’t there throngs of helpless creatures badly in need of my assistance? So watch out, people of Eden, West Virginia, Eden, Illinois, Eden, Texas, Eden, Wisconsin, and Eden, Idaho! I’m loading up the apple pie! I’m turning on Agatha! I’m tromping the accelerator! Lewis Carroll is barking excitedly! We’re on our way, and wherever there’s a couple cleaving in the bedroom, the kitchen, the library, we’ll be there. Wherever there are lovers cleaving in the basement, the attic, the laundry room, the den, we’ll be there to hustle them out to the garden!

And P.S.: Madeline and Jarris eventually got married! Old E. Jean knows a proposal when she sees one.

For more than a week now, an American hiker has been lost in northern Mexico’s deep Sierra Madre canyons, in the town of Urique, Chihuahua, where the Caballo Blanco Ultra is held each March. Police first thought that Patrick Braxton-Andrew, a 34-year-old Spanish teacher in North Carolina, went missing while alone on a hike. But as investigators in both countries learn more, they’re realizing the case might not be so simple.

Braxton-Andrew had flown to Chihuahua city on October 24. He planned to take the El Chepe train over the Sierra mountains to the coastal town of Los Mochis, Sinaloa, then meet his brother in the country’s capital for a Day of the Dead celebration. The train covers some of the most gorgeous high-elevation pine mountains on either side of the border, passing through 86 tunnels and over 37 bridges. At the train route’s zenith, it pauses at Divisadero, a small town that overlooks the Copper Canyon, which in parts is nearly twice as deep as the Grand Canyon. The Tarahumara natives—the famous long-distance runners of Christopher McDougall’s Born to Run—sell handmade wares in stalls outside the train stop. Mexican visitors are everywhere snapping photos. For a place as remote as the Sierra mountains, it can feel a bit touristy.

Braxton-Andrew, above all, loved hidden places. He’d traveled through much of Southeast Asia and Central America searching them out. “That’s what he lives for,” his father, Gary, told Outside. So in the interest of exploring he rode a bus three hours down serpentine switchbacks to Urique, where he’d read online about a national park with deserted trails.

In Urique, Braxton-Andrew’s family said he met a group of fellow travelers, the only other foreigners in town besides himself. They explored the Copper Canyon National Park and the river together, but as the weekend came to an end, they went their separate ways. On October 28, the last anyone heard from Braxton-Andrew, he mentioned to his family one last hike.

More than 100 police officers, a canine unit, and drones, have scoured the river at the bottom of the canyon, as well as nearby rancherias, including Guadalupe Coronado, El Naranjo, Chiltepin, and El Guayabo. Locals, including Tarahumara villages, have also helped in the search. But Andrew-Braxton’s brother, Kerry, told Outside that his brother had talked to friends and coworkers from a local internet cafe that afternoon. In one message, he seemed to describe the final hike, which would mean Andrew-Braxton had finished his trek that morning and returned to Urique.

There is also what he left in his hotel room: practically everything. He left his jackets and the nice camera he took everywhere worth Instagraming, both of which Kerry said he’d have taken on a longer walk. All that was missing from his pack were the clothes he’d been wearing, some money, and maybe a book. “He was most likely either going to dinner, or if he had a book, maybe there was somewhere around town he wanted to see where he might have gone to sit and read,” Kerry says. Police have also started looking less around the park, and asking more questions in town.

Urique lays at one of the Copper Canyon’s deepest points, and while its remoteness draws the occasional adventurer like Braxton-Andrew, these same remote qualities also make it ideal for outlaws. The region is known locally as the Golden Triangle, because it’s where Mexican cartels grow most of the drugs they traffic to the U.S. In 2015, warring gangs cut short the Caballo Blanco Ultra. A mob of armed, flack-jacketed men stormed a local police station and left with two officers in the back of their truck. The race’s organizers evacuated all foreign runners after gunshots and grenades were heard.

And the same week that Braxton-Andrew went missing the heads of six men believed to be in a local cartel were found outside a gas station in the town of Creel, where the El Chepe train passes through on its way to Divisadero.

The Sierra register some of the highest murder rates in Mexico. But Randy Gingrich, who runs a non-profit called Tierra Nativa that gives aid to Tarahumara in the region, says he could not recall the last time an American was harmed in the mountains of Chihuahua. That’s because even in a place as lawless as the Sierra there have always been certain rules. Cartels killing other cartels, or even targeting local Tarahumara who refuse to grow drugs, or give up their land, is common. A weekly occurrence even. But if the drug gangs did something to a tourist, it could mean the area is growing increasingly paranoid, which might bring greater violence to the region. “Now,” Gingrich says, “I am very concerned.”

Police say the locals are also obeying another unwritten rule of the Sierra: staying silent about any details. But Andrew-Braxton’s family is hopeful somebody knows what happened to him and will come forward. The family has talked with the foreign tourists he met up with in Urique, but are still trying to get in touch with a young man from the group who stayed behind. He was camping in the area, and he might have even moved on to Central America, where he said he’d be traveling next. “The bottom line is we want Patrick back,” his father, Gary, says. “That’s the most important thing to us. And we’re here for the long run.”

As of this writing, the ongoing Camp Fire in northern California was responsible for taking at least 42 lives and destroying more than 6,400 homes. Both numbers are expected to rise as the fire continues and as first responders sift through the wreckage. As extreme wildfires like this one become the new normal across the American West, I thought it’d be important to put the devastation they create in perspective.

The Camp Fire was likely started by downed power lines sometime on Thursday morning. Near-zero-humidity conditions had left brush bone dry, meaning embers burst into flames almost immediately. Powerful winds coming down from the Great Basin whipped those embers forward in what survivors have described as a firestorm. By the time those flames reached the town of Paradise later that day, the fire was advancing at a rate of 80 acres per minute. Reports indicate virtually the entire town was destroyed. As of Tuesday, the fire measured 200 square miles and was only 30 percent contained.

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While this is the deadliest fire in California history, it still falls behind other massive conflagrations when it comes to size and fatalities. The Peshtigo Fire, which burned 280,000 acres of Wisconsin in 1871, killed at least 1,500 people. According to the Wisconsin Historical Society, the area had been suffering such a significant drought that its residents had grown used to the smell of smoke and the presence of ash in the air. So the town of Peshtigo didn’t take any extra precautions when they went to bed on the night of October 8. Late that night, “all hell rode into town on the back of a wind,” stated one survivor. In the ensuing panic, many people remained in their homes, all but two of which burned down.

Neither fire approaches the size of the Great Fire of 1910. There, hurricane-force winds met drought conditions, burning three million acres in the northern Rocky Mountains. A sparsely populated area, only 78 people were killed, many of them firefighters. It’s this fire that led to the U.S. Forest Service’s policy of fire suppression, which is often cited as worsening today’s wildfire conditions.

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The Camp Fire supplants last year’s Tubbs Fire as the most destructive in the state's history. Tubbs is infamous for also burning through an urban area, destroying 2,800 homes in the city of Santa Rosa. It took 22 lives.

While no costs have yet been tabulated for the ongoing disaster, the Tubbs fire may help us gain an understanding of how much the Camp Fire is going to cost. Its damage was estimated at $1.2 billion, while firefighting costs were $100 million.

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To me, what’s remarkable about the Camp Fire isn’t just the sheer amount of destruction. It’s the timing. In addition to Camp, there are two other terrible fires ravaging California, and all of this is happening just months after the devastating Carr Fire destroyed parts of nearby Redding. In fact, seven of the 20 most destructive fires in California history have come in the last year alone. The Camp Fire isn’t an outlier—it’s just the latest indication that, out West, we have to get used to living with wildfire year-round.

My conclusion then was the same as it is now: climate change is going to massively worsen fire conditions in the American West and we will have to find new ways to live in that much more fire-prone landscape. Until we do, we’re not watching small, fast-moving individual disasters—we’re looking at one very big one.

Wilderness therapy has been used for decades to help troubled teens and addicts, and lately all kinds of people are turning to guided nature experiences to detox from our hyper-digital modern lives. The classic approach of such programs is to push you to your limits to build character. That can work great, but it's not a smart recipe for those recovering from trauma. Not long ago, contributing editor Florence Williams, author of the The Nature Fix, went backpacking with victims of sex trafficking, writing about it for Outside's May 2018 issue. Now she's adapted the story for The Three-Day Effect, an Audible series that explores what happens in our brains when we go outdoors. This excerpt of that project reveals the surprising ways we can find comfort in wilderness.

My father’s e-mail didn’t make much sense, but he seemed to be saying that pirates had boarded his boat. “Being kidnappedby filmcompany Deep south blackcult took over steering,” it read. “Ship disabled.”

He sent this to my mother, Martha Carr, at 4:30 a.m. Pacific time on May 28, 2017, a Sunday. She was at home in Los Angeles, asleep, and she wouldn’t see the message—and a couple more like it—until 8:30 a.m. For several hours, my dad, 71-year-old Richard Carr, must have thought they weren’t getting through.

Dad was in the middle of the Pacific Ocean, on his way from Puerto Vallarta, Mexico, to the Marquesas Islands, 26 days into a single-handed, 2,780-mile crossing that was to be the first major leg of a lifelong dream: sailing around the world. It was 3:30 A.M. where he was, near the equator, an hour behind Pacific time. He was 1,160 nautical miles from the Marquesas, 1,975 from Hawaii, and 1,553 from Mexico—about as far away from land, and help, as you can get.

His boat was a 36-foot Union Cutter called Celebration, built in 1985. It had a white hull, faded teak decks, brass portholes turning turquoise, and forest green sail covers that always reminded me of summer camp. Climbing into the cabin was like disappearing into a hobbit hole—a dark, welcoming space with oak cabinets and big cushions.

Just six hours before Dad sent the pirate alert, late in the evening on May 27, he had used his satellite text messager and tracking device to wish Mom a happy 39th wedding anniversary. He also wanted to ease her concerns that his boat was pointed the wrong way, something she’d noticed on a map that indicated his position based on the messages he sent.

“Hey Hon. I’m fine,” he wrote. “I have enough food, etc. The watermaker is still working. Pulling over & parking in a storm (heave to) is a good skill to have & practice.” He signed off with a smiley face.

The smile was gone now. Ten minutes after his 4:30 message, he e-mailed one of his younger brothers, John Carr, an aerospace engineer in Orange County. “Being kidnapped by pirates,” he wrote. “Talk to martha.” John was asleep, too, and didn’t see it.

About two hours later, Dad followed up with this message to John: “Apparently, I’ve been spared.” A few minutes after that, at 6:54, he messaged Mom: “Hugewind pirates left. I’m fine. Talklater.” He said he’d sent out an SOS and an alert from his EPIRB, an emergency device that transmits a satellite signal to rescuers when a boat is in distress. He asked her to call and cancel them.

At 7:54, shortly after sunrise where Dad was, he wrote Mom: “Message me as soon as u can. I’m really shaken.” Then he tried John again: “Very scarey. Thought I would not see day.” For Dad, sunrise meant nearly 13 hours of sitting in humid 80-degree weather in the doldrums—an area near the equator with fickle conditions that leave sailors becalmed one minute, huddled in squalls the next, and then scrambling to catch a big gust of wind.

Around eight in L.A., Mom went outside to do some gardening before it got too hot. She still wasn’t aware of the e-mail Dad had sent. “Richard usually messaged me in the afternoon, and I would write back,” she told me later. “So I didn’t check my e-mail when I got up.”

At 8:30, the phone rang. It was John calling to discuss the strange e-mail he’d received. She ran upstairs to her laptop. It was then, roughly an hour after Dad sent his final message of the morning, that he finally heard back from the family. Mom’s first message to him said: “Omg-what do u need? Are u ok?”

She phoned my brother, Tim, who lives in Culver City, about 45 minutes from her house, with his wife, Jen, and their two young boys. Tim messaged Dad, asking if he was all right and giving him instructions for canceling an SOS. Then he drove to Mom’s. Once there he called me in Woodstock, New York, where I live with my husband, Ian, and our two small daughters.

Before leaving, Dad had given Mom a list of emergency contacts. She called a California branch of the Coast Guard and was advised to try Honolulu instead, because that part of the Pacific is their territory. A woman answered. After listening to the details about Dad, she checked for an EPIRB alert from him. When she came back, she said, “There’s been no signal.”

What was going on? There were various possibilities, and none of them seemed good. We scrambled to find answers, knowing there might not be much time.

Richard Carr grew up in the 1940s and ’50s near the Erie Canal just outside Buffalo, New York. As was typical in that area at that time, he was one of seven kids in a hardworking family with stern parents, all of them crammed into a three-bedroom house.

The boys in the family were often out all day, until dinner, and Richard was no different. He taught kids to swim and fish for the local Boys’ Club and built a canoe with his older brother to explore the canal’s feeder creeks. He and his best friends played Lost Boys along parts of the Niagara River, when he wasn’t diving in it with members of the scuba club he started.“He was an optimist,” my uncle John recalls. “He always had the outlook that there was something to do and it was always good.”

In 1963, Richard was offered a full scholarship to study marine biology at the University of Miami, but his father refused to divulge the family’s income on the required forms, so the aid fell through. Ready for some distance from his hometown, he caught a free ride to L.A., where he took classes at a community college to make himself eligible for residency tuition at California universities. To save money, he worked at a Laundromat and sometimes lived off ketchup packets mixed with water. (“Tomato soup,” he joked.) He was shy, but he had a sunny, magnetic smile.

Mom saw him for the first time in 1969, at Oakwood, her private high school in L.A. Born Martha Gold, she was a popular tenth-grader, with long red hair, parents who worked in the film industry, and a horse that she jumped in competition. Dad was interviewing to teach seventh-grade science. By that time, he’d earned a degree in anthropology from UCLA and was interested in psychology. They didn’t start a relationship until 1975, when Mom was at UCLA as a psych major. They met in a professional group, and though Mom declined his invitations for a while, she finally gave in and agreed to go out with him.

Cortez, one of Carr's sailboats. (Courtesy The Carr Family)

“I was an anxious person and didn’t have a lot of relationship experience,” she says. “He helped me work through my resistance and wasn’t put off by my weaknesses, so that showed me a lot about his devotion.”

They married in 1978; by the next year, Mom was pregnant with Tim. Dad, who had learned to sail in California, sold a boat he owned—a 31-foot Mariner ketch called Cortez—and bought an old Spanish-style house in the San Fernando Valley, where Tim and I grew up and where Mom still lives. My parents were busy raising us and tending to clients in their therapy practices, but sailing was always on Dad’s mind. He often tried to convince Mom that the family should sail around the world together, but she wanted her kids to have a normal upbringing.

My parents shared an office suite in Hollywood, across from the famous Capitol Records building. As a kid, I’d sometimes sit in the waiting room while one of them finished a session. I’d sort my Mom’s tea collection and watch gem-toned fish flit about in Dad’s saltwater tank. Over the years, in addition to his practice, he became deeply interested in research. He explored the neurology of babies in the womb and wrote a book about the neuroscience of art therapy.

Though Dad was devoted to his work, our coffee table was never without an issue of Cruising World. On some weekends during my childhood, we sailed a rented boat to Catalina Island, a half-day’s trip from L.A. We often camped and skied, and also traveled to Hawaii, snorkeling and listening to Dad tick off the names of the fish we’d seen.

More recently, as he prepared to depart on his circumnavigation, I thought about taking sailing lessons and joining him somewhere tropical. Father-daughter time felt sacred by then, because we hadn’t lived in the same state for almost ten years. The occasions we spent together—a ski trip to Mammoth, a daylong sail off Los Angeles Harbor—established our dynamic. We dipped comfortably into troughs of silence crested by deep conversations about life.

Dad’s quest to sail the world got serious on March 16, 2010, when he made the final payment on a boat he found in the San Francisco Bay Area called Celebration. It had a crack in the bulkhead, a rusted mast step, and a hull full of blisters. He planned to devote the next few years to readying it.

The boat had been known as Pelican, until the previous owner changed it. According to legend, renaming a boat enrages the sea gods if you neglect to do various ritualistic things, like burn the old ship’s log. I have no idea if the prior owner adhered to that tradition, but we do know that he made it only as far as San Diego on his own around-the-world attempt. There he suffered a stroke and was sidelined. Seven years after purchasing the boat, my dad bought a carved pelican figurine at a stop in La Paz, Mexico, and mounted it in the cabin as a talisman.

During the summer of 2010, once Celebration was fit to use, it was temporarily docked in Oxnard, 60 miles northwest of L.A., and my parents spent weekends sailing to the Channel Islands. Mom enjoyed the trips but had no interest in big ocean crossings. Instead of joining Dad on his circumnavigation, which would play out in stages over several years, she planned to meet him in various ports around the world.

That fall, Celebration found its new long-term home in busy, industrial Los Angeles Harbor, at a small, homey marina called Lighthouse Yacht Landing. It was tucked into the terminus of a maze of massive cranes playing Tetris with container ships.

Dad spent weekends fastidiously working on Celebration, but eight hours a day was a lot for him. “He wasn’t a carpenter or a mason or a plumber,” says Thor Faber, a boat repairman who sold Dad equipment to prepare for long sails. “It’s taxing for somebody who is 40 or 50, but for someone who is 60-plus it’s a big adventure.”

Still, Dad couldn’t stay away, and the more time he spent on the boat, the more obsessed he became with getting everything done. When his professional work got in the way, he grew frustrated and cranky. Marty Richards, Dad’s liveaboard neighbor, says he could never suggest a fix for something without inviting a lengthy back-and-forth.

“Your dad was a stubborn guy,” he told me. “Kind of a self-taught guy, and I think he pretty much lived his whole life that way, right? He wouldn’t take anything on faith unless he could understand it intuitively. He just wouldn’t believe it.”

Dad hoped to depart in late 2015, but an El Niño weather forecast loomed for that winter. Plus, the boat wasn’t seaworthy yet. The delays felt monumental to him. It was as if sticking to the schedule was the primary goal, and he couldn’t see that being patient would allow him to practice and prepare. I think he also sensed that, at this stage of his life, getting ready for such a trip might require more time than he had left.

Mom became anxious as the departure date got closer. Their lives had been intertwined for decades, and he was about to leave on a voyage that could go on for years. The repairs—which came to nearly half the cost of the boat—caused frequent arguments. But she had to accept that he wasn’t going to give up his dream, so they moved forward, at times clumsily, toward his ultimate adventure.

The start of 2016 brought a major new expense: Celebration’s decks were rotting and had to be replaced. After that repair was completed, in Marina del Rey, Dad motored down the coast toward L.A. Harbor. En route, the engine started smoking, and it blew a head gasket, requiring a partial rebuild. Crucial time to test gear and practice single-handing was slipping away.

Finally, Dad refused to delay any longer. He forced himself to get going by signing up for the Baja Ha-Ha, a two-week cruising rally with 130 other boats that ran from San Diego to Cabo San Lucas, Mexico, at the end of October. He would go with his marina mate Marty Richards.

Dad and Richards made their way to San Diego, and the whole family gathered there to say goodbye. Mom kept her nerves under control by orchestrating dinner. Dad’s anxiety peaked as he tried to clear years of collected junk from Celebration—piles of pencils, rulers, and other dead weight.

I was nervous, given Dad’s track record with mishaps like the overheated engine, which required a Coast Guard tow. But I also understood the exhilaration he felt on the water. Over the years, as part of my career, I’ve snowboarded backcountry terrain and climbed in the dark with thousands of feet of exposure. I was proud that Dad was going for it. I knew there was a chance that he wouldn’t come back, but I’d rather he try—risk and all—than live with regret.

One night in San Diego, after the kids were asleep, Tim and Ian went to the hotel bar. A sailor there started talking about pirates along the African coast, an area that Dad would eventually find himself in as he sailed around the world.

Carr in San Diego, before setting off for Mexico and the South Pacific. (Tim Carr)

“That really alarmed us and made us question if Richard knew what he was doing,” Ian remembers. “We were crying into our scotch. We knew he was going no matter what.”

“I remember feeling impressed at how brave he was and proud of him for going, but I was also terrified,” Tim says. “I gave him a hug on the boat and told him I was afraid he wouldn’t come back.”

When it was time to pull away from port, Mom ran off briefly to put something in the car. When she got back, Celebration was gone. “That was when I really started to worry,” she says. “How could he forget to say goodbye?” She called his mobile. After fueling up, he turned around, docked, and said a proper farewell before rejoining the rally.

Problems ensued as Dad and Richards made their way south. Among other things, they had to fix a leaky bilge pump, which had caused an alarming amount of steam to pour from the engine compartment. New noises kept Dad awake on the first night. “He was so sleep deprived he was slurring,” Mom recalls of their phone conversation the next day. “His thoughts were all over the place.”

And his eyes were playing tricks on him. At one point in the night, he thought he saw a forest of trees rising from the water, illuminated by phosphorescence. “Despite knowing they couldn’t be real,” he wrote later on his blog, “I had to wait … and watch the branches dissolve into fragmentary illusions.” Hallucinations worried us, but we also knew that they’re not uncommon among sailors on overnighters.

Even so, Dad had some hard things to face. “The real journey, which had been more challenging than my conjured fears before we started, left me needing to reflect and redefine my trip,” he wrote. “Questions tormented me... When Marty’s gone, who will I talk things through with? How will I hold up sailing day and night on long runs? Am I really ready to single-hand this trip? A reality that had been an idea just a few days before was unfolding according to its own design as the life I’d agreed to.”

Cabo Corrientes, rocky and pointed like an arrowhead, is the last piece of land jutting into the Pacific at the base of Mexico’s horseshoe-shaped Banderas Bay. Head east and you’ll hit Puerto Vallarta, the bass-thumping spring-break destination. Head west and you’ll hear nothing but wind and the slap of the ocean against your hull.

I can picture Dad clearing that spot on the morning of May 3, 2017, his hands loosely gripping the boat’s metal wheel and his blue eyes surveying the horizon. He would have uttered an “mmph” to mark the moment before he went back to winching and charting and setting angles. “My sea journey has really begun,” he texted as he moved out. “Only ocean to the Marquesas. Lite winds. Breakfast time.”

The huge expanse ahead would be his first ocean crossing, and it would also be the hardest leg of his planned route, judging by the likely weather patterns and duration—an estimated 27 days. When I asked what scared him most about the trip, he said it was sleep deprivation, an inevitable issue for single-handed sailors, who often are so busy that they can rest only in chunks.

Dad had spent the month and a half before departure in La Cruz de Huanacaxtle, prepping to join the Pacific Puddle Jump, a migration of boats that cross from the Americas to French Polynesia, mostly during March and April, when the winds are strong and storms are rare. But April came to a close, and he still had repairs to make. Fortunately, the weather window remained favorable for a few extra weeks, and there were at least a half-dozen boats crossing at the same time. On May 2, the birthday of his first grandchild, Brendan, he set sail.

Celebration under sail in 2016. (Deena Mitchell)

Celebration, a slow but sturdy boat, was equipped with solar panels, a wind generator, a watermaker (or desalinator), a four-man life raft, a self-steering device, a flare gun, a $1,300 survival suit designed for dangerous Alaskan fishing conditions, and provisions for three months, among other items.

“It’s an easy boat to handle,” says Mike Danielson of PV Sailing, a Puerto Vallarta–based marine service center that helped Dad rig. “If you’re in a gale, that boat can heave to and weather it out.”

Heaving to—a maneuver used to slow a boat’s progress and basically park it—is a skill Dad would practice often on this trip, especially when he was in the Intertropical Convergence Zone, where the north- and southeast trade winds meet near the equator. This region is infamous for chaotic weather that alternates between rain squalls, shifting winds, thunderstorms, and dead calm. The patterns become more frenetic as summer approaches. “It’s feast or famine out there,” says Danielson. “Getting across the convergence zone at that time is a lot of work.”

I was due to have my second baby a week before Dad’s estimated arrival in the Marquesas on May 29. Both of us would be facing difficult challenges thousands of miles apart—me in labor, him single-handing—and that made me feel close to him. Our family had preliminary plans to meet in New Zealand for Christmas.

On May 3, as Dad sailed west and Cabo Corrientes slipped below the horizon, my water broke—three weeks early. Later that day, I delivered my second daughter, Wyatt.

“Congrats on new daughter,” Dad wrote the next morning. “Delivered with your special drama, flair and courage to do all U can.” As he headed into the empty Pacific—wishing he’d been present for Wyatt’s birth—seven birds kept him company, perching on the bowsprit, falling, scrambling, honking, and perching again.

At first the trip was a dream. Every few days, Dad would let us know how great the conditions were. “Lovely light air sailing,” he wrote. It filled me with relief and joy to know that, after years of hammering and tinkering that had left Dad’s hands greasy and raw, the boat was finally living up to its stout reputation. He was really doing it.

Eventually, the seas got bigger and rougher. Dad’s self-steering wind vane—which allowed him to leave the helm to cook or clean or sleep—was overwhelmed by winds and swells, and he had to stay on deck and help steer. Exhaustion set in, and the less than ideal wind direction he was trying to harness required vigilance.

By the time he was ten days in, averaging a slow, steady 80 to 90 nautical miles per day, he was getting to know himself in isolation. He told Mom that he was having a lot of internal dialogue, which for him was a normal way to deal with demanding situations.

As the days went on, the frequency of Dad’s messages slowed, as did his forward progress: he was making only 77 miles a day now, and his overall trip time was recalibrated to five weeks. Because of rough seas, he was having trouble eating without spilling. Worse, his watermaker had stopped functioning shortly after he left Banderas Bay. Mom relayed repair notes from Thor Faber; after two weeks, during which he probably drank from the backup supply, Dad got it working again.

In his third week out, on May 20, he wrote that “gear & wind & wave” had knocked two pairs of glasses off his face, leaving him with a single damaged but wearable pair. “A bit scarey couple of days,” he said. “Adveture & learn or die trying ;}};.” He followed with this cryptic note: “Horizontal winds that turn ranbows sideways pose question of how does one sail in that? Very carfully!”

For days the weather flopped between foul and calm. On May 26, two days before Dad sent his first message about pirates, he made a sharp turn south toward Hiva Oa—the second-largest island in the Marquesas—but storms blew him back 20 nautical miles.

“No joy!” he wrote. He told Mom that he was reevaluating everything. “It’s the whole plan,” he said. “Boat and I r not really going.” His next message read: “Damn t.” The weather router had just told him it would take 24 to 48 hours for the winds to become more favorable.

In the doldrums, time slows down. Explorer Jason Lewis, who has sailed in that part of the Pacific, described it like this in Jonathan Franklin’s book 438 Days, an account of the saga of Mexican fisherman Salvador Alvarenga, who survived being lost at sea in the Pacific for well over a year: “The lightning comes down to the water. You’ll see these thunderstorms developing, and they’ll be very dark and foreboding. You watch them for hours, rolling toward you. … Every day out there feels like a week … and every week feels like a month, a month felt like a year.”

In the same book, explorer Ivan Macfadyen says: “If you start to imagine saber-toothed tigers in the corner of the room, then suddenly they’re all over you. The fear factor is overpowering.”

Dad was never a complainer, but he was worried about the calm conditions. “This not a little thing,” he texted. “It’s over a week of lite adverse winds.” His fuel tank was nearly full—he could have motored most of the way to Hiva Oa—and he seemed to be forgetting that the weather wouldn’t always be like this.

“Big challenges going on,” he wrote on the 26th. “I need some new ways of approaching them. Strangest thing just happened. Too odd & Long for InReach. Involved scam moviemaking.”

Mom, alarmed, responded within minutes: “Scam moviemaking? Are you in contact with others? Food and water holding out?” She told him she wanted to hear more about the challenges he faced. He didn’t respond.

On the afternoon of May 27, around 1:15, he wrote: “Rain—Intense at times, moments horizontal. my decks are relatively clear, not sails. Happy Anniversary 39 years of bliss. Re movie scam. Maybe my Beautiful Mind ala My Sailing Mind. Take this as possible book idea. As real dilemma. After2 days sleep dep, Banderas Bay, Shortwave radio playng unknown to me made me think I was in trouble. Then thought to check it. Had a laugh.”

Then she got the message that made it clear his boat was facing the wrong way. “I was in rolling seas, storm cells encroaching & gusts to 28Knts, so I heaved to,” he wrote. “Parked. Big storm Moving north.… Adverse til next Friday. Can u believe it. Obstacles at almost every step. The communication difficulties o”

The text ended there.

On the morning of May 28, once Mom had read the “deep south blackcult” pirate messages, the family started reaching out every ten minutes: “Are you okay?” “On phone with coast guard.” “Trying to find you.” “PLEASE ANSWER.”

We got nothing.

The Coast Guard tried to raise Dad by text, but he didn’t reply. Tim wrote: “Please respond to John Mom or Ali ASAP.… Want to know you’re safe and unhurt. Maybe you’re sleeping?”

Four hours of silence passed before Dad emerged at around 12 p.m. his time. “It’s part of being put in my pjace Southern style,” he wrote. “More later.”

But nothing followed that provided any clarity. Instead, roughly an hour later, he wrote: “I’m fine now. One of those nearby fishing boats was in empjoy of a southerq boss. Who, unbeknost to me, wanted to put me in my place. Long story.”

Why was he being so murky? Had he been kidnapped by pirates and someone else was sending these messages? Was he trying to communicate in code? Mom asked for his radio frequency so she could relay it to the Coast Guard in Honolulu. “You need to reply … NOW. What you are saying makes no sense. Anything stolen?” The Coast Guard messaged boats in the area via satellite, asking them to keep a look out for Celebration.

An hour went by before Dad said he’d try the Coast Guard over the SSB, a long-range radio favored by open-ocean sailors. He apologized for not responding, then said: “Nothing stolen No one hurt, No info on boat. Was inside deciding best action.”

We were relieved but confused. Would pirates allow him to stay inside to review his options while they were aboard?

At 2:55 p.m. Dad’s time on the 28th, after he reported that the radio channels were occupied, Mom sent him the Coast Guard’s e-mail address and wrote, “I have been hysterical today. Tim with me all day. What did the fisherman do exactly? Also, what language?”

At 3 p.m., the Coast Guard texted him again. He sent his coordinates—N 6 35.9712’ W 127 17.7952’—and then messaged them: “This is vessel. Celebration WDJ4510 needing to confirm cancellation of epirb 2DCC7B512CFFBFF this morning 5/28/17 around 6:30AM. Cannot reachUSCG on SSB.”

Tim let Dad know that no emergency signal had been sent or received, adding that we were glad he was OK but this was scary for everyone. He signed off: “Love you!!! Be safe.”

Sailing in the Bahamas in 1981. (Courtesy The Carr Family)

We were still baffled. Dad’s abrupt shift—from giving us vague information about pirates to providing lucid housekeeping details to the Coast Guard—made no sense. Why couldn’t he be clear about what had happened to him?

An hour later, he wrote Mom: “Still may be in trouble if myinfo gotinto public record.” She responded that nothing had been made public. At 5:08, he told the Coast Guard: “I’m sea beigwatched.”

“We don’t understand your message,” they replied. “Are you in distress? Did anyone come aboard your vessel? What is deep south black cult?”

Tim’s wife, Jen, wanted to confirm that someone else wasn’t pretending to be him. “Tell me something only you would know about me. What do I do for a living?” she wrote.

“Physical sports therapy,” he said. Correct.

Mom pressed for details about the pirates, with minutes passing between responses. “We spoke about Phyllis’ disability She’s retarded or speech disabled,” he wrote, referring to someone we’d never heard of. “She thought Iwas afriendwho should stay. I refused.”

“Who spoke with you about Phyllis?” Mom asked. “Was she related to one of the fishermen? I have no context. This sounds bizarre. Did they board your boat? Threaten you?”

“I luv u always,” he said. “Marni ashes buried at sea Al’s too.”

That was a gut punch. Marni and Al were Mom’s mother and stepfather. They’d both died in the two-year period before Dad sailed. One of his goals was to spread their ashes in the ocean.

“When I saw that message, I thought, Uh-oh. He’s going to do something,” Mom said later. “It was like he was taking care of business.”

A year earlier, Dad was sitting bedside with my mom’s mother as she lay dying of cancer, her body withering into a feather. “I don’t know how to die,” she whispered.

“You don’t have to. Your body knows what to do,” he said into her ear. “You can choose to go anywhere else in your mind. Think of a childhood memory, think of something that you love.” She thought of a camping trip with her sisters. A few hours later she was gone.

Now it was Mom’s turn to talk to him. “Thank you sweetheart,” she wrote at 6:06 p.m. “I am feeling alarmed you aren’t responding to my other questions. It’s safe to send message. Do u want to go to Hawaii instead?”

Three minutes later he responded:

“Killers. Watch yourback sorry…”

A few minutes after that:

“Hawaiisoundsqood barbeque at sea.… Sorry about insuance.”

“WHAT ARE YOU DOING?” Mom wrote. “You are scaring me. What is happening? Sounds like you are going to hurt yourself! Do you need help? Say yes or no.”

“Thesepeople r killers it’s nott beautiful mind,” he said.

With Martha in 2016. (Courtesy The Carr Family)

All that day, Dad had moved, slow but steady, on his southwesterly route toward Hiva Oa. But now the map, which updated his position with each message, showed him heading due west. He was drifting off course.

At 6:59, he wrote: “Hekilled hisdaughter well not himhis aid. Poison crack. She’s dying These r old south. People will say I sucided. Better thanwhat he intends,I’ll wait. Miss u.”

“Is your ship disabled?” Mom wrote. “Company?”

“No not in significantway. Listen talk speakers with remote personne.”

“Listening on radio? Who is talking to you?”

“Listeningtome&hisdaughtr talk& re-porting back.”

My sister-in-law broke in, saying she was worried. “So am i notlookingto die,” he wrote. “Don’t want to be killed or enslaved.”

At this point, the Coast Guard requested that he type a simple Y or N to this question: “Is your life in danger?”

“I believe so,” Dad responded. A few minutes later, he wrote to our family: “Goodby.”

Over the next hour, his responses slowed. At 8:48, Tim wrote: “Satellite shows nearest boat is many many miles away. This isn’t just a lack of sleep right?” At 9:08, with no new message from Dad, Tim begged: “Hit SOS please.”

Family members kept messaging late into the night, but no one heard from Dad after 8:30 his time. The final e-mail from him read: “Not able stop Patjustgot news she’s toberescued&instijtutionalized byher- boy friend.”

All this was happening in the late afternoon and evening where Dad was. In New York State, I was four hours ahead. The last I’d heard, from the message relayed by Tim and Mom (“I’m fine now”), he seemed OK. By the time the situation started deteriorating, I was asleep for the night with our new baby. Mom didn’t know which messages were getting to me, and she didn’t call because she knew it was late on the East Coast.

At 2:30 a.m. my time on the 29th, I woke up to feed the baby and decided to check my phone—something I usually don’t do, but I felt an overwhelming need to message Dad, to let him know I was sending love.

The next morning, I found this e-mail from Mom. “I know you will be getting up before us and will see some scary e-mails from dad last night,” she wrote. “Coast guard says there are no boats near him. He sent us a few more e-mails after the one that says goodbye. But we don’t know what this means yet. We will loop you in as soon as we are up. Just hope he didn’t do something stupid out of paranoia. We messaged him to go to sleep. Hope he read.”

I called Mom and Tim and asked them to forward the messages. What I read looked schizophrenic. I studied them over and over; the fear in his words was tangible.

Martha and Tim, 1981. (Courtesy The Carr Family)

The Coast Guard hadn’t been able to find any instances of piracy in the area where Dad was. Later research, using records from the International Maritime Organization, showed that of the 204 reports of piracy and armed robbery worldwide in 2017, only three occurred in the region where Dad was sailing. All involved large container-style ships and had happened in Peruvian and Ecuadorean ports.

By the end of the day on May 29, we hadn’t heard from Dad for 24 hours. During a conference call with the Honolulu Coast Guard, I asked about the possibility that he had run into hostile fishermen in the early-morning hours of the 28th.

“Maybe he crossed their nets and they had to come on board to detangle his boat in the middle of the night,” I said. “That would be terrifying—it would be dark, he hadn’t seen people in weeks, and most likely they spoke another language and were angry.”

The Coast Guard didn’t rule it out.

Another question loomed: Had anything at all happened to him? Dad said he’d sent EPIRB and SOS signals, but he hadn’t. And what had he meant by “barbeque at sea”? The message “sorry about insuance” showed up immediately after that. Was he telling Mom that she wouldn’t be able to collect insurance money because there would be no body to recover?

This was so far from how I envisioned Dad leaving this world. I yearned to know what his face looked like, what his heart felt like in those rawest of moments. His words didn’t tell us. As darkness fell around me on the 29th, my mind looped the same haunting questions: Dad, where are you? What did you do?

At noon on May 28 in California, as Mom and Tim were waiting for a sign of life from Dad, the Coast Guard had asked about his mental-health history. Mom told them that he’d never had any problems. But judging by his reaction to sleep deprivation during the Baja Ha-Ha, she said, he may have been delusional from exhaustion.

The Coast Guard began scouring for resources—boats, planes, anything—to get eyes on him. The nearest boats were 200 nautical miles away, more than a day’s journey. A cargo plane could have reached him, but he was so far out that the crew would have only ten minutes to search before they’d need to turn back.

At 11 p.m., a staffer at DeLorme, the maker of Dad’s texting and tracking device, confirmed that it had stopped accepting messages at the exact moment he’d sent his final one. The device had either been turned off, malfunctioned, or been destroyed.

At 1 p.m. on Monday the 29th, the Coast Guard reached the U.S. fishing vessel -American Enterprise, which was 140 nautical miles southeast of Dad’s last known location. The skipper agreed to head to that position immediately.

To construct a search grid, the Coast Guard uses a program called the Search and Rescue Optimal Planning System. It gathers information such as a boat’s size and -location, plots 5,000 corresponding points on a map, and creates simulations of likely drift patterns. The Coast Guard usually sends a boat or plane to cover these drift points -immediately. If it can, it drops a self-locating data-marker buoy, which uses the current to validate the system’s predictions. In Dad’s case, he was too far away for either of those options.

Through all this, my family tried to figure out what else we could do. Mom e-mailed the Tahitian authorities. I called the most experienced sailor I knew. He suggested I try to contact fishing and commercial vessels in the area. Uncle John scoured real-time ship traffic online. Mom asked if there were any satellites taking pictures that might show us the boat or, worse, its debris. (There weren’t.) Tim e-mailed the IMB Piracy Reporting Center. But everything we were doing had already been tried by the Coast Guard.

On the evening of Tuesday, May 30, American Enterprise, along with its onboard helicopter, began a grid search southwest of Dad’s last known location. By the evening of May 31, three days since we’d heard from him, they had searched an area the size of Connecticut, with no sign of either the Celebration or any debris.

Meanwhile, a 688-foot Panamanian boat joined the search 240 nautical miles to the southeast—an area where the Coast Guard hypothesized that Dad might be. No sightings were reported.

By June 2, we were becoming desperate. We knew that Dad, even if he was still alive, probably couldn’t survive much longer. On June 4, a week since we’d heard from him, two more boats searched but saw nothing.

A day later, there was a glimmer of hope: the Coast Guard’s satellite data showed what looked like a sailboat headed south, which aligned with initial hypotheses about the boat’s course. Its length and color matched Celebration. The Coast Guard speculated that the boat was harnessing the trade winds south and would make a hard right at Hiva Oa’s latitude.

Unfortunately, by the time satellite data hits the Coast Guard’s desk, it’s 24 hours old, making a moving target nearly impossible to find, especially among scattered clouds and whitecaps.

American Enterprise, which was now the closest ship to the unidentified boat, sent up its helicopter again. The crew saw nothing.

On the 6th, the Coast Guard queried Tahitian hospitals to see if Dad had been brought in. Negative.

On June 8, Dad’s 72nd birthday, the Coast Guard again spotted an unidentified boat along the southern course—about 30 degrees off a Marquesas route. It was getting closer to Hiva Oa, traveling at four knots. Assuming it might be the same boat as before, the Coast Guard used the new data to create a third potential position.

Finally, on June 13, two weeks after my dad’s last communication, the unidentified boat was close enough that the Coast Guard deployed a plane from Hawaii.

After staging in Tahiti for a day, the C-130 Hercules would fly out, loaded with a communicator, a life raft, and other droppable supplies. The eight-hour round-trip flight would leave only two hours to search at the site, but at least it was something. The Tahiti coast guard’s Falcon surveillance plane would also search.

On the 15th, the planes took off from Tahiti. They scoured the boat’s path. Three vessels were spotted, and one remained unidentified, because it had no electronic signature. However, it didn’t match the description of Celebration, and radio contact confirmed that it had two people aboard.

Subsequent searches found nothing, and on June 21 the Hercules was sent back to Hawaii. On June 22, the Coast Guard suspended the search. All told, it had covered 59,598 square miles over 24 days.

In the 17 months since Dad vanished, no trace of his boat has been found. I doubt it ever will be—although one drift-analysis expert suggested that, if Celebration is still floating, it could hit New Guinea in two years. But I believe that the boat—or what’s left of it—is at the bottom of the Pacific, with Dad’s last coordinates serving as his only headstone.

I’ve spent hours trying to imagine what happened in the end. I’ve pictured Dad in an altered state: eyes glazed over, stoically moving about the boat as he completed necessary tasks, like dealing properly with my grandparents’ ashes. Or maybe he was sobbing—heartbroken to know he would never see his family again. Then he either set the teak deck on fire or cut an intake hose, filling the boat with water and sinking it.

If he did any of these things, it was because sleep deprivation had driven him mad, making him believe that suicide was the only way to escape the pirates he’d conjured, the only way to prevent them from killing him.

He didn’t have a gun on board, as far as we know, so he would have died either by fire or in the sea. Did he stay on deck as flames rose around him? Tim doubts it. He thinks Dad started a blaze, dove off the side, and swam straight down. I picture mottled moonlight reflecting on his pale skin as he descends into darkness.

The idea that sleep deprivation made Dad take drastic action may sound fantastical, but there are countless precedents. It’s known that exhaustion, fatigue, and isolation at sea can create extreme levels of delusion. Experienced sailors told me stories of mates who were rendered incapacitated just a few hundred miles offshore, with no obvious cause.

One of the most famous sailing mysteries is the case of Donald Crowhurst, a Briton who single-handed in the 1968 Golden Globe around-the-world race and never came home. He set sail on October 31—the same date Dad set off from San Diego—and was out for 243 days before he succumbed to mental collapse, writing a 25,000-word manifesto on the subject of the cosmic mind and why he had to leave this world. His boat—and log—were found floating in the Atlantic Ocean.

John Leach, a professor with the Extreme Environmental Medicine and Science Group at the University of Portsmouth, England—and an avid sailor and former military psychologist who specializes in prisoners, hostages, and others who’ve experienced isolation—described the perils of survival in the book 438 Days: “It’s okay living inside your own head, provided it doesn’t slip into psychosis.”

When I speak to Leach about my dad’s case, he describes to me how a mind can become unmoored. “Psychosis in simple terms is a breakdown in reality,” he told me. “When you are in isolation, and sleep deprived and water deprived, which I suspect he would’ve been, you take in the information around you and interpret it to fit the model in your head. If he thinks he’s being chased, he’ll hear waves and the wind as engines.”

The cluster effect of sleep deprivation, dehydration, fatigue, duress, and perceptual and sensory deprivation could have resulted in cognitive disorganization that was reflected in his language, Leach explains. In other words, Dad’s signals may have been misfiring, skewing his perceptions. And the timing didn’t help.

“There is something around about the three-week period in isolation that I’ve recorded too many times to dismiss,” Leach says. “Even people without psychiatric problems get a sudden crash psychologically, and for the first time they start thinking about suicide.”

My mother, sure that Dad was suicidal, had tried to reply to him in ways that would bring him off the ledge.

“Your dad used to tell me that the brain is the only organ in the body that doesn’t tell you when it’s malfunctioning,” she says. “I was afraid to say to him that’s what I thought was happening—that it was a hallucination—but I couldn’t figure out how to do it. I didn’t want him to feel abandoned and stop talking. Hearing each other through a sat phone would have helped, but he didn’t have one.”

When I ask if she has regrets, she laments not being more involved. “I felt so angry about him wanting to do this and spending so much money and he was going to leave me. I had to say, This is just his,” she says. “I didn’t want to go but I didn’t want to be alone, either. And he would’ve resented me if I had said, ‘You are not going.’ ”

Distancing herself mentally from the boat, the trip, and the departure date was a coping mechanism—the less she had to do with it, the less fearful she was. But she still wanted to be a brave, supportive wife, so she helped by packing and provisioning the boat in San Diego. Now she wonders if that was enough: “If I had educated myself about what he would face out there, I might have been more persuasive about him not going alone.”

Then Mom tells me something I didn’t know. “He always felt like we got the life I wanted, not the life he wanted, filled with adventure—diving and sailing,” she says. “He didn’t care about living in a nice house. He cared more about living in other places and exploring.”

“When he talked about buying the boat, I tried to offer him alternatives to make life more exciting,” Mom says. “But he couldn’t be swayed.”

Eventually, they were too far along to turn back. “It felt like the boat was in charge of him,” she says. “I know it wasn’t personal but still, the fact that he went off on this trip felt like I wasn’t enough. Ultimately, the boat won.”

Dad loved us—that’s why he compromised on how he wanted to live. His obsession with the boat and the trip suddenly made sense to me. He wanted to reclaim his life.

In the end, my family can go around and around on what happened and why. We’ll never really know. We can feel guilt, regret, and anger. But we’ll always return to this: maybe Dad wasn’t experienced enough to chase his goal, but he had to try or he’d die wondering, resenting his own life. It’s hard to say that anyone should die this way. But the question remains: If you have a lifelong dream, and time is running out, what would you do?

I’m standing in a single-wide trailer that serves as the office of the Nuevo Vallarta marina. It’s the checkout point for boats departing Mexico in the Nayarit region, 30 minutes north of Puerto Vallarta by car, and the last place Dad docked before setting out to sea.

Carr and Martha in 1975. (Courtesy The Carr Family)

Under fluorescent lights, I see “Richard Irwin Carr” scribbled across a photocopy of his departure papers and recognize his compact, jaunty handwriting. I know it intimately from birthday cards and school notes and phone messages on our brick-colored kitchen counter.

On May 2, 2017, in the early evening, Dad filled out the line labeled Voyage Plan: “Sail to South Pacific and around world.” It reads like a fantasy, like a little boy trying to catch smoke with his fingers.

I can picture his face, flushed from a combination of pride and embarrassment as he handed the papers back to the clerk. Then he would have stuffed his hands into his jeans pockets.

Ian and I walk down to the spot where he had his boat—A-23, the only unmarked stall in the marina and the one most often used for short-term, transient vessels. I touch the cleat where his rope was last unfurled. I’m sure that the sounds around us are no different than they were on the day he left: children playing at a nearby preschool, a boat being sanded, birds chirping, and the occasional large yacht motoring past the marina to sea.

Being here makes it hard to imagine the drama of Dad’s last hours. I think back to the text he sent for Mother’s Day, nearly two weeks into his crossing. I told him I’d thought of him during Wyatt’s birth, and he said: “Think of me often. I’m an interesting person who loves you as a person as well as my daughter. And I find that gratifying!”

A few days later, Ian and I charter a sailboat from the dock in La Cruz where Dad parked for a month and a half before he headed to Nuevo Vallarta. Palm trees and bougainvillea stand out against the white stucco of the thatch-roofed buildings surrounding the marina. The Sunday craft fair is a fiesta of coconut popsicles, fish tacos, and fresh juices.

The deckhand is a young, thin Mexican man in his twenties named Eddie. He looks like many of the skater boys I went to high school with in L.A., wearing Vans and a chain wallet. He puts on Def Leppard and Weezer as we sail into Banderas Bay. His English is excellent. I explain why I’m in town, and when I mention Celebration he grows quiet.

“I remember your dad,” he says. “Short, with gray hair.” Eddie had helped him rig his sails. Then he says, “I offered to go with him.” Eddie had been looking for work as a paid deckhand.

Dad had hoped to find mates to sail with during parts of his circumnavigation—he once wrote on his blog that the experience would feel incomplete without sharing it—but he was anxious about the laws in the South Pacific. He told my mom that he didn’t want to be financially responsible for his crew, potentially made up of strangers, and any medical needs they might have once they hit the ocean. Being beholden felt too risky to him.

As we sail out toward Cabo Corrientes, I take in the horizon, cupping my hands at my eyes like blinders. I want to imagine what it’s like to see only the edge for days on end. I shake my head at the knowledge that Dad turned down Eddie’s offer. He would probably still be alive.

Back home, people ask if going to Mexico was hard. Maybe I was in denial or just numb, but it wasn’t. Being there made me feel close to Dad. The hardest part was leaving, like I wouldn’t feel his presence again unless I returned for a visit.

The other hardest part is that he’ll never know Wyatt. She’s a risk-taker. My first daughter would sit quietly on the bed or changing table, while my second wants to swan-dive off it. I can see her natural inclination to push things out of the way and investigate everything around her.

With the author in Santa Fe. (Courtesy The Carr Family)

A writer I know who has interviewed some of the most daring athletes in the world—people who have both flourished and perished in their edge-of-peril pursuits—told me that, at some point, if we feel the itch in our soul to explore, we have to go. Some will consider Dad’s behavior reckless, arguing that he was underprepared (I can’t argue) and irresponsible (maybe, though he waited until his children were grown before setting off). But to assert that he was wrong to go, my writer friend said, is “to deny a potent ingredient that made him who he was—the joy in him, perhaps.” I agree. Maybe I’m like Dad and I would have gone, too.

At the memorial we held five months after he vanished, a family friend talked about the grudge she felt when he first explained his plan to sail around the world.

“How dare he do what he feels like doing,” she said with a chuckle. She told me that she realized her anger was a manifestation of envy and admiration. She respected his doggedness and willingness to do what most are too frightened to.

Patients from his practice—some who had seen him for more than 30 years—-introduced themselves and told stories about times when their lives would’ve gone south if Dad hadn’t been there. I was meeting them for the first time, but they felt like relatives. Their gratitude for him, and for his unrelenting determination, matched what I felt.

Just like his granddaughter, Dad kept pushing things out of his way to get to the horizon. He had a burning thing inside that inspired him to look over the edge. And for a few days at least, he sailed with abandon, the wind at his back.

Like any adventurer, Dad didn’t know how it would end. He had to sail away to find out.

Ali Carr Troxell (@Alicarrtroxell), a former editor at Outside, is the managing editor of the magazine Gear Patrol.

In Magnetic, director Nuit de la Glisse spans the globe, touching down in Pakistan, New Zealand, Tahiti, and the Alps, all the while trying to discover just what it is that draws adventure athletes to the outer limits of human performance. The full film will be premiering in Paris, France on November, 30th .

Have you ever thought, ‘Mom, how could you say that?’ This film is full of those moments. The Backcountry Moms brings together Carole Armstrong, Donna White, and copious amounts of tequila for a conversation about their pro skier daughters, Alex and Virginia, respectively. What follows is quite possibly the funniest video about backcountry skiing that you’ll see all year. This film was made by Daniel Thomson, Justen Bruns, and Keenan DesPlanques.

]]>Outside Editorshttps://www.outsideonline.com/2365501/one-goes-out-backcountry-momsMon, 12 Nov 2018 13:56:09 CSTA Day in the Life of a Mountain-Bike Trail Builder

Clayton Woodruff, vice president of Progressive Trail Design (PTD) in Bentonville, Arkansas, misses digging in the dirt. When he joined the mountain-bike trail-building company in 2010, just a few years after his brother, Nathan, founded it in 2007, he’d spend up to six months a year either in the seat of a miniature bulldozer, literally cutting new singletrack out of the raw earth, or following behind the machine, shovel in hand, to smooth it out. It was just him, his brother, and a few close friends back then. Today the company has about 30 employees, and Woodruff spends most of his work hours behind a desk, not heavy machinery.

“I was just telling someone that I’ve gone soft these days because, I’m like, Oh man, I need air-conditioning,” he says. “But there is a lot less job stress when you know all you have to do is build stuff.”

And no wonder. On a typical day for Woodruff, there’s planning to be done, designs to be drawn, employees to manage, subcontractors to be hired, and an unbelievable amount of red tape to cut through. While a ground crew can knock out about a mile of new trail in a couple of hours if the conditions are right, it can take years to get the necessary erosion-control plans, environmental-impact reports, and other paperwork approved before a single shovelful of dirt can be moved.

Compared to that, actually building a trail is fairly simple. He and the other designers will look at a topographic map and start laying out possible routes based on the contours of the land and the scenic overlooks and features they want riders to enjoy. Once a route has been determined, they’ll walk it and mark it with brightly colored survey flags, adding switchbacks and doglegs along the way to ensure the slope of the trail doesn’t exceed an erosion-friendly 10 percent grade. Then, using a combination of experience and intuition for what makes a trail fun, the crew member manning the mini bulldozer simply starts cutting a track from flag to flag.

“That’s where skill comes in,” Woodruff says. “We compete against landscape construction companies for projects, but you almost have to be a rider to be able to go into the woods and visualize what that trail’s going to look like. If you take that knowledge out of it, you’re just digging in the dirt.”

From there, the rest of the crew follows on foot, wielding hand tools to spice up the route and make sure it rides the way they want. That can mean ten- to twelve-hour days on the ground for weeks at a time.

Gaining that level of expertise, both at the office and in the woods, was a long journey for a company that began almost by accident. But looking back now, it seems a little like fate. If you’re not a mountain biker, you probably know Bentonville as the home of Walmart’s headquarters. If you are a mountain biker, you know that the sleepy Ozark town, population 35,301, is becoming one of America’s singletrack meccas (which you can read about here, here, and here). But that wasn’t always the case. When Clayton and Nathan were growing up in these hills, most of the mountain biking they could find was either on old dirt-bike tracks or trails built illegally in the woods.

Then in the mid-2000s, Nathan, who was working toward a career in education, helped build a few routes at a nearby state park, and when Bentonville started thinking about creating some new, downhill-style bike trails, his name sort of popped up for the job. From there he founded PTD and took on any project he could find, often subcontracting for larger organizations like the International Mountain Bicycling Association’s trail-building division and sleeping in dingy RVs in parking lots to save money while working gigs. As the company grew, so did Bentonville and America’s demand for quality singletrack, and PTD has since built trails everywhere from Bend, Oregon, to Baja California Sur, Mexico.

One key to this success could be the brothers’ approach to their industry. That is, while they are very much your stereotypical mountain-biking bros who love drinking beer and shredding on their bikes, they’re all business when it comes to their work.

“Mountain biking has this culture around it that’s not taken seriously,” Woodruff says. “If I was giving advice to someone looking to do what we do, it’d be to send in a professional e-mail and résumé. If somebody just sends ‘What’s up bro? All this seems chill,’ I’m not inclined to hire that guy.”

Today 20 of PTD’s 30 employees work full-time year-round. It’s their professionalism and institutional knowledge that lets them juggle the seven to ten projects they take on each year.

But no matter where their next project is or what kind of trail they’re building, the best part of the job continues to be the same. No, it’s not getting paid to ride (though Woodruff admits that’s pretty great, too)—it’s riding their new trail with friends or clients for the first time.

Last May, exactly one week after Garmin announced the InReach Mini, Spot released its first new device in five years. It’s also the company’s first device with two-way satellite messaging.

The Spot X retails for $250, weighs 6.7 ounces, and features a 2.7-inch dot matrix screen and physical QWERTY keyboard. It looks like an orange BlackBerry with an oversized antenna.

I used the Spot X this summer while guiding trips in the Colorado Rockies and High Sierra.

Review: Spot X

To break into the two-way messaging market, the Spot X needed to be somehow better than the category-leading InReach units. In some respects, it is.

The Spot X is simpler, designed to be fully functional as a standalone device.

Each unit has a dedicated U.S. mobile phone number, so it’s easier to send messages to it from cellphones or other two-way satellite messengers.

It has twice the battery life of the InReach SE+ and Explorer+ (in ten-minute tracking mode).

Both the device and comparable service plans are less expensive.

Since the initial Spot X launch, the company has released several firmware updates to eliminate coding bugs and improve the user interface. Spot is listening to customers and seems to be invested in the Spot X.

But currently, the Spot X still falls short:

The keyboard and control pad lack touch sensitivity and responsiveness.

It’s twice as heavy as the InReach Mini.

It lacks smartphone connectivity, which could allow users to share contacts, sync wireless settings, and use the phone’s keyboard and touchscreen.

There are minimal navigation features and no weather reporting function.

The online portal needs to be aesthetically refreshed and more user friendly.

Barring significant improvements to the Spot X and its platform, the two-way satellite messenger I recommend for most users remains the Garmin InReach Mini, which is slightly more expensive but is more pleasant to use, has more features, and weighs less. That said, I can think of two scenarios in which the Spot X would be the better device:

If your budget does not include an extra $50 to buy the Mini.

If you don’t have a smartphone or don’t carry one into the backcountry, in which case, you can send messages more efficiently with the Spot X.

The screen and keyboard can be illuminated for easy nighttime use. (Andrew Skurka)

The Damn Keyboard

The Spot X has a major flaw: its physical keyboard. Even if the Spot X were perfect in every other way, the keyboard makes me not want to use it.

In fairness, the “virtual keyboard” on the InReach units is annoyingly tedious. But at least there’s a workaround: using the Earthmate app on my smartphone.

The Spot X keyboard has three problems:

The keys are small and flat-topped, so it’s difficult to feel individual keys or press a single key without also pressing adjacent keys.

The three lowermost keys—alt, space, and uppercase—require pressing with excessive force.

The select button isn’t tall enough. It should be higher than the surrounding directional keys so it’s easier to press.

The physical keyboard has problems. The keys are small and flat-topped, and the keys on the bottom row are not responsive or smooth. (Andrew Skurka)

If you can get beyond the keyboard, here’s the rest of what you need to know.

What Does the Spot X Do?

The Spot X has four capabilities.

1. Messaging

The Spot X can send and receive text messages and short emails. This makes it fundamentally different than other Spot devices like the Gen3, which can only send messages. Messages can be predefined, custom, or posted to social media (Facebook, Twitter, or both).

Each Spot X has a personal U.S. mobile number, which makes sending messages to the device much easier. The process of sending messages to an InReach device is less straightforward.

2. Tracking

The Spot X can broadcast its location at intervals of 2.5, five, ten, 30, and 60 minutes. The basic service plans do not include the 2.5- and/or five-minute intervals.

3. Emergency

If life or limb are in danger, the Spot X can send an SOS message directly to the GEOS International Emergency Response Coordination Center, which will notify the appropriate emergency responders.

4. Navigation

The Spot X has a digital compass and allows you to create waypoints. (You can create waypoints more efficiently in the online portal, but still only one at a time.) It does not support maps—neither a simple grid map nor image-based maps (such as USGS 7.5-minute tiles or proprietary data).

Its navigation capabilities are comparable to a standalone inReach Mini, but the Mini pairs with the Earthmate app, which gives your smartphone similar (or even greater) functionality to a conventional handheld GPS unit.

The Spot X has rudimentary navigation capabilities. It has a digital compass and allows you to create and go to waypoints. (Andrew Skurka)

What Doesn’t the Spot X Do?

Compared to existing two-way messaging devices, what features are lacking in the Spot X?

1. Phone Connectivity

The Spot X is a standalone unit and cannot be paired with a phone. If it could connect to your phone, you could share your contacts with the Spot X instead of having to enter them in the online portal before your trip. You could use your phone’s touchscreen to navigate the Spot X’s user interface and to type messages (preferable to the crappy keyboard on the Spot X). You could also update settings like your check-in recipients list and predefined messages without requiring a hard-wire computer sync with the Spot X Device Updater.

2. Weather

Before I leave for a trip, I always check the backcountry weather forecast. But on longer trips, receiving an updated forecast can be extremely helpful. Unlike the InReach, the Spot X cannot pull down a forecast for current or user-specified locations.

Cost of Ownership

The long-term cost of a Spot X includes the initial purchase price plus your chosen service plan.

Initial Purchase

The Spot X retails for $250, which is $50 to $100 less than competing units.

Service Plan

You’ll need a service plan to operate the Spot X. Currently, three tiers are available in either annual or month-to-month subscriptions.

Basic: $12 per month if you pay for a year up-front; $15 per month for a month-to-month subscription

“By the end of the day, I expect to be standing on the beach, shooting a fire burning to the Pacific Ocean,” Stuart Palley, a wildfire photographer who has spent the past five years shooting wildfires in California, told me over the phone Friday morning. He called me as he was driving south on the Pacific Coast Highway, headed from Oxnard to Malibu.

He expects to encounter extremely dangerous conditions in Malibu, as the Santa Ana winds blowing out to sea hit on-shore winds from the ocean. “The swirling winds create unpredictable conditions and that’s when people die,” Palley says.

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There are two fires currently burning around Malibu: the Hill and Woolsey fires. As of this morning, the Hill Fire had burned 7,000 acres and the Woolsey Fire 10,000. Togeher, they’ve jumped the 101 freeway, burning into the Santa Monica Mountains and forcing the evacuation of 75,000 homes. Meanwhile, an as-yet-unnamed fire in Griffith Park started Friday morning; it has already burned 30 acres and is forcing the evacuation of animals at the zoo. Then there's the Camp Fire in northern California that burned 1,000 structures overnight and has grown to 70,000 acres. CNN says that in total, the fires caused 150,000 Californians to be evacuated from their homes last night.

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All of the above fires are developing so rapidly that there's very little reliable details about them online. (I encourage readers to consult CalFire, the radio, and first responders for the most up-to-date information.)

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Tens of thousands of people are under mandatory evacuation orders and Palley says that the fires in the Santa Monica Mountains, above Malibu, have developed so fast that many of the roads there have become impassable even to firefighters. Residents are under instructions to shelter in place.

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“So far there have not been any civilian casualties,” says Palley. “But that could change very fast.” He described “apocalyptic” conditions to me as he drove towards Malibu.

https://twitter.com/latimes/status/1060948885365960704

Fuel loads across California’s brush-covered hills are extremely high, humidity is extremely low, and there's no rain in the forecast. Over 20 million people in the state are currently under red-flag fire warnings. “These are the worst wildland-urban interface fire conditions I’ve ever seen,” says Palley.

Could saving our nation’s natural heritage be the issue that unites a divided country? It looks that way, at least in New Mexico’s 2nd Congressional District, where a pro-public-lands Democrat achieved a narrow upset over a pro-Trump, anti-monument Republican.

To be fair, Torres Small mostly campaigned on key issues such as immigration, health care, and education. But she's also been consistently vocal about protecting the Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument, a 776-square-mile preserve made up of wild, rugged mountains that's located in her district. Designated by President Barack Obama in 2014, the monument is popular with locals, but was nevertheless the target of efforts by President Donald Trump and Interior Secretary Ryan Zinke to shrink several national monuments last year.

“The community invested over a decade to carefully study, document, and negotiate protection of these Wild West lands,” Torres Small wrote in an open letter to Zinke in June. “The result is a stunning national monument that receives overwhelming local support and attracts national and international acclaim, and the accompanying tourism dollars that come with that. Please, don't interfere with our hard-earned source of local pride. Let us keep our Organ Mountains-Desert Peaks National Monument.”

Since 1961, when Royal Robbins, Tom Frost, and Chuck Pratt made the first ascent, the Salathè Wall on Yosemite's El Capitan has stood as one of the pinnacles of big wall climbing. The first ascent crew split the climb into two trips: they climbed the first 900 feet in three and a half days, then came down on fixed lines. Several days later, they went back up the fixed lines and took another six days to finish the climb.

In 1997, Japanese climber Yuji Hirayama tried to onsight the route—which means they attempted to climb it on his first try without any falls or prior knowledge of the line. Hirayama fell at the Teflon Corner, pitch number 24 of 35. If that pitch sounds familiar, it’s because the Salathè Wall shares approximately 87 percent of Freerider’s terrain, the route Alex Honnold famously free soloed in 2017 after years of practice. The two routes diverge at pitch number 29, the Headwall, with Freerider taking a slightly easier line.

Onsighting a route takes a particular set of skills. Primarily a climber has to be incredibly good at reading difficult sequences of moves. But they’ve also got to be strong enough to hold on while they figure things out, or to downclimb to a rest when they’re a little unsure how to proceed. A single fall and the onsight doesn't count.

Enter Adam Ondra, by far the best climber in the world. The 25-year-old Czech has onsighted routes as hard as 5.14d (the Salathe Wall is 5.13b), but had never onsighted anything as massive as the 3,000-foot Salathè Wall.

Last weekend, he gave it a go. Starting at a minute past midnight, Ondra and his partner, Nico Favresse, made it up over 2,500 feet to the Headwall (the route’s crux) where Ondra fell twice.

“Some dreams came true yesterday, but the ultimate—the onsight—is not fulfilled,” Ondra wrote on Instagram. “And the nature of onsight is that it will never be fulfilled any more. It is only one try, lots of pressure in case of such a legendary route like Salathè in Yosemite on El Capitan.”

With Ondra’s one chance gone, this monumental achievementremains to be accomplished.

On Tuesday, voters affirmed their commitment to public land and conservation in an era of multifaceted attacks on wilderness, wildlife, national monuments, critical habitat, and clean air and water.

From Montana to Minnesota, to states as far from the West as Connecticut and Georgia, voters turned out in decisive numbers to support pro-public-land candidates and to oppose the pro-industry favoritism of President Trump and interior secretary Ryan Zinke. Equally noteworthy, several races wound up with Republicans and Democrats toeing the same line of public-lands support—lending credibility to the idea that conservation issues offer a rare space for politicians and voters from both parties to meet in the middle. “You look at the big picture and candidates in swing states realized that pro-public-lands stances are a beneficial place to go,” says Aaron Weiss of the Denver-based nonprofitCenter for Western Priorities. “It’s one of the last big issues that really speaks to folks in both parties.”

“Overall, the observance is that conservation issues were on the ballot across the country,” says Jenny Rowland of the Center for American Progress, “and we’re seeing that voters are rejecting the Zinke- and Trump-branded attacks on parks, the oceans, and national monuments.” All told, the Center for American Progress reports that public lands and environmental issues played decisive roles in at least 14 races.

“My hope was that public lands would become a top-tier issue and not something we only care about after we have a roof on our head and pay for health care,” says Land Tawney, president of Backcountry Hunters and Anglers, based in Missoula, Montana.“That was my hope, but I didn’t think it would play this well in places like Minnesota.” Tawney says he was particularly encouraged to see Erik Paulsen, a Republican from Hennepin County, Minnesota, which includes parts of the Minneapolis suburbs, launch his campaign with a video of himself paddling a canoe in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness (BWCA). In the ad, Paulsen pledges to protect the Boundary Waters from a proposed copper-nickel mining project, which Trump and Zinke have sought to facilitate, and which conservationists and environmentalists claim poses an existential threat to one of the most unique freshwater ecosystems in North America. “When President Trump tried to take away important environmental protections for the Boundary Waters, I said no way,” Paulsen says in the ad while standing on the reedy shores of a Minnesota lake. “I’ll stand up to my party or President Trump to protect Minnesota.”

Paulsen lost to Democrat Dean Phillips, who also opposes mining near the Boundary Waters, but for Tawney, the fact that both candidates stepped up for the BWCA is noteworthy. In Tawney’s home state of Montana, a nail-biter of a race between Republican state auditor Matt Rosendale and incumbent Democratic senator Jon Tester, the legitimacy of each of the candidates’ claims to support public lands and conservation was under heavy scrutiny. Rosendale had difficulty escaping the long shadow of his formerly enthusiastic support for the sale and transfer of public land, which he expressed with unflinching conviction back in 2014 when he ran against Zinke in the Republican congressional primary. He sought to recant that position throughout 2018. Tester, who has long been considered a champion of public lands and conservation, helped craft the Rocky Mountain Front Heritage Act, which passed in 2014 and expanded the Bob Marshall Wilderness Area by 67,000 acres. This year he worked across the aisle to get his Montana Republican colleagues senator Steve Daines and congressman Greg Gianforte to support a bill to withdraw 30,000 acres of U.S. Forest Service land near Yellowstone National Park from the mineral leasing program.

Rosendale lost despite Trump visiting Montana four times in recent months, often on what seemed like a personal mission to derail Tester. “Jon Tester successfully turned public lands and public-lands access into a third rail for Republicans,” Weiss says, explaining how a wave of land-transfer bills failed at the level of state legislatures across the West back in 2015, including in Montana, at the height of the land-transfer movement. Tester seized on that moment to cement enduring support for public lands. “The more extreme folks in the state are not making it to the federal level,” says Weiss. “They have to run to the middle on public lands and support for public access.”

Nevada senator Dean Heller, the incumbent Republican who applauded Zinke’s controversial review of national monuments last year and has proposed legislation to eliminate wilderness study areas, lost to Democrat Jacky Rosen, who stuck up for monuments and made public lands a central part of her campaign. In New Mexico, senator Martin Heinrich, a Democrat who has also defended national monuments and last year helped to open access to the Sabinoso Wilderness Area, easily defeated his Republican opponent, Mark Rich, who has called for Bureau of Land Management land to be transferred to the states and then privatized.

Ballot initiatives also spoke to the muscle of a pro-public-lands and public-waters constituency. In Connecticut, an initiative to make it harder to sell state lands passed by 84.5 percent. After a scandal last year involving Zinke’s decision to exempt Florida from the Interior Department’s nationwide offshore drilling expansion, following a request from governor Rick Scott (whose Senate race against incumbent Bill Nelson, a Democrat, may be headed for a recount), Floridians voted to ban offshore drilling. Georgians voted by a four-to-one margin to divert 80 percent of sales-tax revenue from sporting-goods stores into a state-run conservation fund. (Of course, the news wasn’tall good.)

With an empowered public-lands caucus in the Houseand an imminent changeover of chairmanships on vital committees like the House Natural Resources Committee, conservationists and environmentalists are hopeful that popular bipartisan legislation, like a bill to reauthorize the Land and Water Conservation Fund, will finally become law. Since 2015, the House Natural Resources Committee has been chaired by land-transfer proponent Rob Bishop of Utah,a Republican who has also sought to undermine the Endangered Species Act and wilderness protections. Ranking member Raul Grijalva, a Democrat from Arizona, will likely chair the committee starting next year. Beyond the LWCF, public-lands advocates are hoping Congress will move forward with pending legislation to fund wildlife protection and habitat enhancement, parks maintenance, and conservation components of the farm bill.

Grijalva is pledging to use the committee’s investigate powers to investigate Zinke and other appointees who he calls “ethically challenged.” “They're going to be held accountable, and if they don’t want to participate in that accountability, then we have other legal recourses to make them do that,” Grijalva says. “And I think we are expected to do that and we need to do that.”

Whit Fosburgh, CEO of the Theodore Roosevelt Conservation Partnership, based in Washington, D.C., says he’s excited to work with a House that would focus on important bipartisan conservation legislation. “We’re not going to see all these extreme anti-public-land, anti-wildlife bills coming out of the House,” Fosburgh says, referring to unviable legislation that has come out of the Natural Resources Committee under Bishop’s leadership, including bills to sell millions of acres of public land, eliminate the land-management agencies’ law-enforcement arms, and allow bicycles and other wheeled vehicles into wilderness areas. “Now we will not have to spend half our time playing defense.”

Fosburgh is hopeful that the new House membership will work to divert more funds to the Conservation Reserve Program in the ongoing farm-bill negotiations. CRP, managed by the Department of Agriculture, pays farmers to take land out of production and set it aside as wildlife habitat. He said that low commodities prices for crops like soybeans may help garner support for CRP from Republicans in the Midwest who are seeking relief for their constituents.

One of the most significant public-lands moments in the election cycle actually happened last spring, when lieutenant governor Brad Little defeated congressman Raul Labrador in Idaho’s Republican gubernatorial primary. Labrador, a Tea Party member who is considered to be far right of center on public-lands issues, wrote an op-ed in 2016 claiming that the Bundys’ armed takeover of Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge was “civil disobedience.” In the same op-ed, Labrador argued for pilot projects that would test local control of land management on national forest lands. Idahoans rejected Labrador. So when Democrat Paulette Jordan and Little faced off on Tuesday, voters had a choice between two politicians who were both appealing to the middle on public lands.

“It feels like we’ve managed to shift the ground on this stuff, so that if public land is a wedge issue, it’s a wedge within the Republican Party and not within the broader electorate,” says Weiss. “And we see that as victory.”

There’s a strong argument to be made that street riding—basically the wintertime equivalent of urban skateboarding—is the most creative expression of the sport. And no one rides as hard, or is as inventive, as Jess Kimura, one of the newest members to The North Face's snow team. While she’s been injured so many times she’s earned the nickname Danger Pony, Kimura has also been rewarded for her ingenuity and fearlessness with countless awards. She’s also typically the only woman featured in the sport’s gritty street films.

That gender gap is one of the reasons Kimura recently added “filmmaker” to her résumé. Instead of sitting on her ass (her words) for the past two seasons while recovering from surgeries, Kimura decided to pick up the camera. The resulting film, The Uninvited, which debuts this October, is the first-ever all-women’s street riding film. “I wanted to create a path to sponsorship for these women,” says Kimura. The film is as raw and honest as she is, and all the more impressive considering that she financed the entire project out of her own pocket.

(Ashley Rosemeyer)

Street riding taught Kimura to be methodical. Although she’s fearless, she didn’t learn to street ride by hopping on handrails above unforgiving urban staircases. “I started by drawing a line in the snow and trying to ride straight down it,” she says. Later, to mimic a rail, she’d bury a PVC pipe in the snow so only an inch stuck out. She built her skills in increments, while also building resilience. “I learned that failure was part of the process,” Kimura says. “That’s what adventure teaches you—how to find and push your limits. It can make life so much more productive.

While urban exploration is at the core of street riding, Kimura hails from the small town of Vernon, British Columbia, and now lives in Whistler. To street ride, she travels to metropolitan areas rich with hills and snow. Once there, she and her crew scout locations, imagine possibilities, and then wait for a storm so they can ride handrails, stadium steps, and parking garage walls. Then it’s game on as they shovel snow into ramps, landing hills, and transitions, often at night, when the streets are deserted. “It’s kind of like parkour but on your snowboard,” says Kimura. “Except on a snowboard you might ride a rail and then drop off a two-story building. It feels more real and more impressive because you make the terrain—not some resort. I’ve had an imagination like a disease since I was a child, and street riding satisfies that part of my brain.”

Kimura loves urban snowboarding because it demands style of creativity, but also because the adventure of street riding is accessible to the masses—and taking an inventive approach to exploring urban areas. “Growing up, I could afford nothing,” she says. “With street riding, all you need is a snowboard and a shovel. You don’t need a season pass, or an address in a fancy resort town.” As evidence of that geographic diversity, The Uninvited was filmed in Salt Lake City, Utah; Sapporo, Japan; and Helsinki, Finland, among other cities. The undisputed epicenter of street riding, though, is Quebec City, for more than the terrain and the climate: “People in Quebec don’t call the cops on you for street riding,” says Kimura. “Maybe it’s because it snows so much there that people are happy to see you digging out the stairways.”

(Ashley Rosemeyer)

Filmmaking is just the latest adventure Kimura is taking on; her next chance to learn. “After surgery, I gave myself one week to mope. Then I got off my ass. Figuring out how to make this film is the mental equivalent of taking all the physical risks of street riding. But it’s more meaningful because I’m creating an opportunity for the women coming up behind me.”

The North Face believes in celebrating the spirit of exploration that lives within us all. From the mountain to the city, they believe that all explorers share a mindset of curiosity paired with the courage to try something new. This 4-part series also includes a climbing prodigy from New York City and an explorer with creative passions just as varied as his climbing ones. | Hero photo credit: Aaron Blatt